


Proof by Contradiction

by OfPillar



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Gen, The Dark Side is Private Industry
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-05
Updated: 2019-02-17
Packaged: 2019-08-19 04:09:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 23,936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16527056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OfPillar/pseuds/OfPillar
Summary: Haptics, the sense of touch, is crucial for human exploration and manipulation of the world.-Five years after Professor Rey Johnson breaks up with Ben Solo, CEO of First Order Technologies, she finds herself roped into talking him out of completing work on a massive, troubling new venture: Project VADER.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I was sorely tempted to name this fic after this highly #relevant Onion point/counterpoint: 
> 
> https://www.theonion.com/i-will-love-you-until-the-stars-fall-from-the-sky-vs-p-1819594256

 

A bunch of stuff happens in the second week of March. For one, Finn and Rose get engaged. Also, Rey finds out that she’s been hired as an assistant professor.

 

All in all it’s a lot to process - Luke, in an uncharacteristic and awkward display of thoughtful mentorship, had presented her with the keys to his old lab space - so Rey does what she always does when confronted with a mess of emotions and nowhere to put them: folds them in half, then in half again, and finally one more time until she can slip them into her pocket,dense and burning like the heart of a star, before joining the rest of the ex-Skywalker lab in a raucous evening of getting absolutely shattered drunk at Maz’s.

 

It’s a Wednesday night and Takodana, a true hole-in-the-wall establishment tucked within the narrow alley between a 24-hour laundromat and Tibetan gift shop, is packed with all the people Rey loves best in this world. She hugs Finn until her arms go numb, gives Rose a shy kiss on the cheek. They have a long and involved discussion about destination wedding locales before Luke shows up and reminds them all that a courthouse marriage license is $105 and they can just hold the reception in the lab.

 

“Don’t be such a _man_ about it,” Maz hisses, slapping him with a rolled-up copy of _Nature._ “Just because Mara turned you down again doesn’t mean you have to take it out on -”

“That’s not - what the hell are you saying?!” Luke sputters back, outraged.

 

“Not bad for a couple of kids straight outta Jakku, eh?” Finn murmurs as they watch the two snipe at each other in hushed, irritable tones.

 

“Not bad at all,” Rey agrees. She grins suddenly because it’s true, they’re not nobodies from a nowhere town in the Arizona desert anymore. They have Google Scholar pages and LinkedIn profiles now, as well as the shared dubious honor of being featured on the university Instagram as part of some diversity-in-STEM initiative. “Do you ever think,” she starts to say to Finn, something strange and tender flipping over in her chest, but just then Jessika appears in a whirlwind of dark hair and charming excuses for tardiness to drag everyone onto the much-abused dance floor. They sway to a mix of Utada Hikaru and Triple H, the music seeping its way under Rey’s skin and pulsing through her veins until the world goes soft and blurry at the edges.

 

She wakes to the phantom memory of fingers tracing the shell of her ear.

 

“-always wanted to go back to Hawaii,” someone sighs from far away. Cracking open an eye, Rey spots the familiar eggshell color of Maz’s apartment ceiling and inhales a lungful of something absolutely fucking _delicious._

 

Stumbling off the pull-out couch, she wanders into the kitchen to see Maz, Finn, Rose, and Luke sitting around the table in various states of disarray. Rey’s own hair probably looks like a bird’s nest, and her mouth tastes disgusting, so when Maz slides a plate of fried potatoes and turkey sausage in front of her Rey falls upon it with the reverence of the very hungover.

 

“Paige and I have some friends who are still in O’ahu,” Rose is saying once she’s shoveled enough grease and carbs in to feel less like a throbbing, aching muscle all over. “They run a cultural center on the island, beautiful view of the ocean, so we could probably get some sort of discount.” She turns to Rey. “What do you think?”

 

“That sounds lovely.” Rey thinks about the spindly green cactus she’d kept in Unkar Plutt’s house with its single bloom like a rosy, many-pointed star. “I don’t think I’ve ever been anywhere that tropical before,” she admits.

 

“It’s settled then. I can’t wait to send _the_ most cordial wedding invitations to Phasma and Hux,” Finn says, reaching across the table and tangling his fingers easily with Rose’s.

 

She grins back, fierce and sharp. “Hope they like glitter exploding all over their clothes,” she promises, and it’s like watching the sun come out from behind the clouds, a wide smile transforming Finn’s face into something so joyful that for a moment Rey experiences warm, shockingly uncomplicated happiness.

 

“By the way,” Luke interrupts, somehow turning towards her and inhaling a stack of silver dollar pancakes drenched in maple syrup at the same time, “thanks for volunteering to go to the expo last night.”

 

*

 

In the five years that Rey has personally known Luke Skywalker, MSc, PhD, and famously reclusive director of the AHCH-TO Center for Interactive Robotics, he’d worked out an 80/20 split of time alternately tinkering with droids alone and saying vague, mysterious things to Rey about her research that only made sense after she’d finished troubleshooting the problems anyway.

 

It’s not that there aren’t worse advisors in the department by far - Rose is still pushing Finn to file a grievance procedure against Hux and his lab manager, Phasma. But while Rey might be seduced into filing patents or writing up and revising manuscripts for Skywalker under sparkly promises of career advancement and first-authorship, she draws the line at actually representing him to several of their top funders at a pop science fair thinly disguised as an academic conference.

 

“But I already let the organizers know to put your name on the program,” Luke says.

 

They’re both crouched on the floor of the lab, the guts of BB-8’s peripheral nervous system spread out around them as they try to figure out what’s making him zap people when they get too close.

 

“Just tell them to change it,” Rey grunts, finally prying the last bolt of the thermal hyperscan ventilator free and letting her spanner drop with a clang. “You’re the actual PI anyway. People want to hear the legendary Luke Skywalker speak, not some former PhD student of his.”

 

It comes off more snippy than she’d intended, but fuck, Rey’s already declared the whole day a wash. Her period arrived last night and the bumpy bus ride this morning hadn’t done any favors for her screaming lower back muscles either. She’d rocked up to work feeling bloated and pimply and vaguely sorry for herself, only to be confronted by a cute delivery boy placing a tasteful bouquet of ferns and hydrangeas on her desk.

 

“What is this?” she’d asked, voice alarmed, pointing at the display.

 

The boy turned to look at her. “Ms. Johnson?”

 

“Yes. Yes?”

 

“This a gift from...” The boy squinted at something on his clipboard and heaved a sigh. “A longtime admirer of your work.”

 

Logically, Rey knew the flowers could have come from anyone. Finn, Maz, Jessika - hell, maybe BB-8 had finally gained full sentience and placed the order. But then she’d reached into the arrangement, unable to stop herself from fingering the fuzzy, powder blue petals, and seen the note card: _Congratulations on the promotion - Ben_ handwritten in rich, flowing black calligraphy.

 

So maybe Rey’s not bringing her A-game today, but that’s 80% on the Skywalkers and their baffling ability to fuck with her life at the most inconvenient moment every time.

 

“Anyway, I’m never agreeing to plans while drunk again,” she declares. “Pass the wire stripper?”

 

Luke gives her a considering look as he does. “The theme of the expo is progress, hope,” he says out of the blue as she diverts power to the motor cascade. “And legends are most inspiring at great distance.”

 

This. This right here is the cryptic shit Rey’s getting tired of. But there’s a heaviness to Luke’s usual dry detachment, a hint of embarrassment in the way he smooths out his lab coat and stands up as BB-8 whirs to life again, beeping happily. Rey thinks back to the flowers sitting on her desk. Hope, and distance. She groans internally.

 

“I still think we have a much better chance of getting the grant money and publicity we need if you do the talking,” Rey mutters.

 

Luke blinks innocently. “Is this about the reporter from Science Daily?” he asks. “Because I thought he already apologized on Twitter last time for describing your ‘soft, chestnut-colored hair and hazel eyes shining with excitement’ instead of the actual-”

 

“Argh,” Rey says. “Fine, I’ll go.”

 

*

 

Rey met Ben Solo during a sparsely attended grad student seminar on machine learning and satellite imagery. Finn was there because Hux was still his thesis advisor back then. Rey was there for the free catered lunch and moral support. In hindsight getting riled up on Finn’s behalf because of Hux blatantly referencing his work without credit was a dumb idea, but it’s a supreme asshole move, so before anyone can stop her she’s raised her hand and is asking, “I see your point about augmentation not translating into a better dice, but why not add it to account for things like rotation invariance in the model so it’s at least more robust to images outside your sample?”

 

The rotation students sitting next to Rey jerked into wakefulness; up front, a dark-haired man standing beside Phasma looked away slowly from his phone and fixed Rey with a stare.

 

“That was a dumb idea,” he said later, somehow finding her as she tried to escape the reception through the building stairwell with her dignity and six cookies tucked into a plastic cup.

 

Rey laughed warily. “Yeah,” she said, eyeing the First Order logo on his jacket, the tallness and obvious strength of him. Finn hadn’t had much good to say about the business Hux consults for. First Order is a software company with government and military contracts that even Rey, with her 1 semester of Ethical Reasoning in college, had known skirted the grey edges of legality. Then she’d looked up.

 

His face was surprisingly young: black hair tumbling into dark observant eyes, a handsome nose and sensitive mouth, more freckles than she could count.

 

“I was hoping you’d let me buy you a drink,” the man - _Ben,_ he told her later, sitting so close their knees knocked together under the table as Maz looked on thoughtfully - said. “You know, in exchange for other ideas on how to piss off Hux, since you seem to have a real talent for it.”

 

“Aren’t you guys coworkers?” she asked.

 

Ben shrugged. “Think of it as a Dwight and Jim sort of situation.”

 

He’d become a constant fixture in her life soon after that; with more dating experience, Rey thinks she might have seen the red flags then, but Ben built her elaborate paper airplanes out of the pages of old Nature issues, let her read his tattered bedside collection of _Animorphs_ and _Ender’s Game,_ slept with one leg thrown over her right hip and touched her everywhere - everywhere. She'd never felt more wanted.


	2. Chapter 2

The expo is a two-day affair in D.C. held in a sleek glass-and-chrome building that belies the absolute chaos Rey experiences upon setting foot inside the convention center. There are too many booths and panel discussions and not enough food or power outlets or restrooms. At some point the Caltech guys’ prototype drone goes haywire and careens into the banner of a research group at Carnegie Mellon. 

 

Rey talks with a guy from the NSF and a woman from NASA about the potential applications of using selenium drives to increase memory without compromising space. “Quite an achievement,” the NSF rep says, watching as BB-8 preens under the attention and shows off by zipping through his miniature obstacle course in record time. Rey can’t help it: she smiles. 

 

Luke hadn’t seen fit to discuss his work in the public domain during his 6-year “sabbatical” in Ireland, so Rey ends up also meeting with a lot of science writers who mostly seem to buy her prepared spiel on how AHCH-TO is developing tools for enhancing fluid human-robot teamwork in time-critical and resource-limited areas. “So like, if we were trying to explain this to a five year old, JARVIS but in cute soccer ball form,” one of them says while eyeing BB-8, who beeps menacingly.

 

“Sure,” Rey says, faint from dehydration. “Why not?”

 

She’s giving serious consideration to sending BB-8 on his first solo mission to refill her water bottle when a man with an iPad and Bluetooth head piece approaches her. 

 

“Dr. Johnson, would you please follow me for just a minute,” he says in a brisk tone that’s not so much question as command, hand already on her elbow and steering them toward one of the side seminar halls. It has the unfortunate effect of making Rey instantly peevish.

 

“What’s this about?” she demands.

 

“Fifteen minutes of your time,” the man promises, smooth in a way that’s not reassuring at all. “Then you’re free to go back.”

 

“I’m not going anywhere,” Rey snaps. She jerks her arm away and tightens her grip around BB-8.  Unfazed, the man glances down at his iPad before frowning.

“Please Dr. Johnson, if you could just step inside.” He raises an eyebrow. “The General’s already waiting for you.”

 

“ _ General _ ?”

 

“Yes,” the man says simply, and then before she can protest any further or look around for security he sighs and pushes her into the room, pulling the door shut behind them.

 

*

“I apologize for my aide,” Leia Organa says.

 

The Senator is a slight woman: dark, polished eyes set in a pale oval face, immaculately pressed pantsuit, steel-gray hair pulled severely back in an elegant bun. She’s eating one of those oatmeal raisin cookies the conference staff keep replenishing in big undainty bites. 

 

They both glance at the aide, who looks slightly chastened. “Ma’am.”

 

Senator Organa makes a rueful noise and waves him away. “Poe’s a take-charge kind of guy,” she tells Rey once the man is standing on the other side of the door. “You learn to either wrangle or selectively ignore him.”

 

Rey smiles woodenly. “Senator, uh, General -”

 

“Please, just Leia.” She leans forward, the corner of her mouth tugging up in amusement. “I know this is probably an awkward way to meet the parents. Well, one of them anyway.”

 

Rey knows the broad strokes of Leia Organa’s life as well as the next person - political dynasty, military background, followed by several consecutive terms in the Senate - but seeing Ben’s mother up close is weird. There’s something about her directness and warmth, the thick laugh lines at the corner of her eyes, that Rey instantly wants to like - and which have maybe been curated for this specific purpose. 

 

Rey swallows. “Ben...didn’t tell me too much about you,” she admits.

 

If that bothers the Senator, it doesn’t show. “Probably for the best,” Leia agrees. Her gaze shifts to BB-8. “And who’s this fellow?”

 

That Rey can answer. “He’s a prototype co-bot designed to interact with humans in a variety of shared spaces. Operating rooms, satellites, natural disaster zones, that kind of thing.”

 

“How absolutely fascinating. So this is what Luke’s been working on for the past decade?”

 

“We’re still iterating, but yes. Professor Skywalker wanted to apply new AI methods to his earlier work on developing semi-autonomous droids. BB-8 was a large part of my thesis.”

 

Leia rolls her eyes. “Oh don’t call my brother that, it’ll go straight to his big head.” Except she’s smiling, exasperated and a little fond, and it’s dumb but that’s what ends up making Rey poke the elephant in the room.

 

“Why did you want to speak with me, ma’am?” she asks.

 

Back before Rey met Finn and he convinced her to leave Jakku for college, she’d spent most afternoons working under the table at her foster father’s garage stripping stereos and refurbishing cars of dubious origin. When she was too young for even that, Plutt had sent her to comb through the junkyard down the street for recyclable cans and bottles, which could be traded in at 10 cents a pop. During the summer months she’d learned to keep an eye out for the warning signs of an impending desert storm: a darkening in the quality of light, a stiffening in the wind, the prickle of electricity making her hair stand on end. Leia feels like all those things now as she leans forward and her brows knit together. Finally, she looks away to stare at a print of Van Gogh’s sunflowers framed on the wall. 

 

“How much do you know about the work Ben was doing five years ago?”

*

 

The expo ends with a dinner and private gala that takes place in an honest-to-god  _ ballroom _ at the Omni Shoreham. Rey moans her way through a luscious plate of prosciutto ravioli and demolishes the tiramisu dessert before letting Jyn Erso, who’s tenure-track at Penn and mildly terrifying, drag her to the open bar some conference planner foolishly chose to install. 

 

“I thought I was gonna die the whole time the keynote speaker wouldn’t stop talking,” Jyn groans as she throws back her third mocktail and sprawls into a chair, kicking off her kitten heels with extreme prejudice. For a woman who’s seven months pregnant, she somehow has even more energy than the last time Rey saw her yelling at another panelist for confusing her work with her husband’s during a conference in LA. “One day, I swear to god, I’m going to tell them to fuck off with these stupid conference hashtags they keep asking us to Tweet with.”

 

Rey nurses her own drink thoughtfully. “Luke keeps refusing to let AHCH-TO get a Twitter account,” she offers. “Though it’s still unclear whether he knows about the lab instagram.” BB-8 is real hit among the 10-18 demographic, apparently.

 

“Just you wait,” Jyn warns, pointing a finger. “I honestly never thought I’d say this, but the older I get the more I understand why Luke is so goddamn hermetic and weird all the time. You get all excited to be a PI and design your own projects, and then the department hits you with a million committee meeting requests and grad students in desperate need of mentorship and you’ll never get to produce any original work ever again because you’re too busy pumping out R01 grant applications or gestating a fetus in whatever free time you have left.” She pokes at her bump resentfully for emphasis.

 

“You have like 3 R01 grants already,” Rey points out. “Also, I don’t think I’m going to need to worry about that last part for a while. ”

 

“Well when you do,” Jyn sniffs, tucking the pink parasol from her drink behind one ear, “make sure you marry a guy like Cassian.”

 

“Strong, silent, sensitive?”

 

Jyn rolls her eyes. “No, has good employer-sponsored paternity leave.”

 

They move on from shop talk and department gossip to discuss politics (terrible), the latest season of Ancient Aliens (terrible), and Jyn’s recent decision to try prenatal yoga (extra, extra terrible). But Rey’s traitorous mind keeps drifting back to her conversation with Senator Organa, and to Ben. Partially it’s because the implications of his work sound genuinely disturbing at a societal level, even given Rey’s limited interest in anything political. And maybe it’s also a bit because, for all of Jyn’s protestations about pregnancy being a useless timesuck and the biggest long con she’s ever let society dupe her into, the woman lights up when Cassian Andor appears to whisk her back to their hotel room, his arm looped casually around her shoulders as she relaxes, happy in his hold.

 

Rey has dated - fine, been on dates with - two people since breaking up with Ben. The first was a geology masters student and the second was a dentist she met on Tinder before deleting the app off her phone after one too many unsolicited dick pics. They were nice men with kind smiles and gentle hands; she even let the geology student slip her a little tongue outside her apartment before the wrongness of it made her pull away apologetically. But Rey’s never kept their numbers beyond the third date, and now every time she checks out a cute guy on campus she feels a needle-sharp stab of guilt, like somehow Ben Organa Solo is sitting in his shiny Palo Alto office in his 1.7 billion dollar technology company with Hux and smoking hot icy blond Phasma feeling  _ betrayed _ that his ex from 5 years ago is swiping right on single men under 40 in the area. 

 

Leia seemed to sincerely believe that Rey can get Ben to listen to reason, however, which is both misguided and kind of flattering, so that’s going to be her excuse ad infinitum for knocking back the last of her rum and coke and stumbling away from the gala into a deserted outdoor courtyard. Her fingers shake a little as she sits down on a nearby bench and unblocks his number. Dials the series of digits from muscle memory. Taps the green Call icon. After a brief moment when the screen seems to freeze up, her phone starts vibrating softly as it tries to connect.

 

The seconds bleed into one another, time dilating with each ring that goes unanswered.

 

Outside the gravity well of Senator Organa’s forceful charisma, shivering in the courtyard of an absurdly expensive hotel in a thin black dress she bought at Zara on sale, Rey abruptly realizes how stupid this idea is. It’s almost 11 pm on the West coast, he could have blocked her number, his new girlfriend or whatever could answer the call, she doesn’t even know if he still uses the same phone -

 

_ Click. _

 

“Rey?”


	3. Chapter 3

Despite the seamlessness with which Ben had fit into Rey’s own life, he never quite warmed up to those around her. When she’d mentioned - casual, careless - during their first date at Takodana that she was doing her PhD under Luke Skywalker, his whole face had shut down so fast she half-expected him to short out.

 

“You should switch labs,” he gritted out after a moment. “He’s not going to be a good advisor to you, trust me.”

 

Ben’s tone made Rey bristle. Luke did leave a lot to be desired in a mentor, but he was generous with his funding and had pointed her research in the right direction when it mattered most. “You know him that well?” she asked, leaning back and crossing her arms.

 

Ben looked down at his beer. Distantly, Rey noted that he had very large hands, artist’s fingers that clenched and unclenched around the cut crystal glass. “Luke’s my uncle,” said Ben at last. “I was also briefly a postdoc in his lab.”

 

And then it had been Rey’s turn to say “Oh”, awkward, and wonder how she missed _that_ particular piece of department drama.

 

By all accounts, there was no love lost on Luke’s side either. When she’d asked him - carefully, disinterestedly - about his nephew a week later, he simply narrowed his eyes and warned her about the dangers of going corporate; how the wrong people with the wrong incentives would compromise the integrity of your research.

 

“Just don’t go to the dark side for a pair of pretty eyes, all right?” Luke said, eyes hard and knowing as she’d reddened.

 

Just to be contrary, Rey responded to Ben’s text about “going hiking sometime” that same afternoon. The unanswered message had sat in her phone ever since he’d said goodbye as she climbed into an Uber outside Takodana, hands shoved inside his pockets but hovering close enough that she could feel the heat of his stare like a tiny personal sun. Ben kissed her after three drinks, fingers sliding through her hair to cradle the base of her skull with exquisite tenderness as he pressed dry, warm lips to her own: boyish and jittery, a little too far to the right.

 

It was a bad idea. As a scientist, Rey was curious to see where it would lead.

 

She wasn’t born yesterday, however, so she invited Finn and Rose along too in what turned out to be an amazingly awkward double date at Goazoa State Park.

 

“What do you think?” she whispered to Finn as they watched Ben and Rose politely admire a massive Bishop pine up ahead.

 

Finn swatted at a mosquito. “I’m thinking why does everyone on the west coast seem to think that coffee plus hiking equals culture.” Sweat rolled down his temple. “Why couldn’t we go to a museum? Museums have _air conditioning_.”

 

“Just tell me,” Rey whined.

 

It took another twenty seconds of wheedling until Finn finally relented, grumbling, “I don’t know. You want me to be honest, I can honestly say that the dude has been an on-fire garbage can whenever I’ve interacted with him. He seems like whoever dates him is going to need to do a fuckton of emotional labor, and I don’t want to see that fall on you.” Looking down at the carpet of pine needles and dirt underfoot, he shrugged. “But you want to like him.”

 

“I’m not the easiest to deal with myself.”

 

“Doesn’t mean you can’t have better.”

 

Finn was her oldest friend, and she trusted his judgement like a child trusts in the endless summer days before school starts: steadfast, with eyes wide open. They’d only been on two dates, her and Ben, nothing irrevocable - but that was before he’d started with the notes.

 

Left on the passenger seat after she dropped him off at his apartment, Finn and Rose snoring softly in the back: two tickets to an evening production of _The Importance of Being Earnest_ at the Bohemian Club, along with a card - “Hi Rey. Probably getting ahead of myself but I’ve been planning this third date since our first. Hope to see you there - Ben”.

 

“You know, that was presumptuous. But clever,” she informed him over late night ice cream after the play, feeling loose-limbed and generous after laughing herself silly for nearly two hours. “Giving me both tickets. What if I hadn’t shown? You would’ve been all dressed up with nowhere to go.”

 

“If you hadn’t shown up,” said Ben, scraping the bottom of his cup for the last melted scribbles of pistachio, “I would’ve sent you two more.”

 

Jesus Christ. “You must really enjoy the play.”

 

“Everyone enjoys it. Don’t we all want to escape our circumstances?”

 

Rey liked him better like this - she liked him a lot - trying to smooth-talk her in a tiny ice cream shop haloed under buzzing fluorescent lights, the architectural lines of his face somehow less forbidding when he was eyeing her double scoop of Rocky Road with obvious interest. It had been a minute since someone put in this much effort for her. Trying to diffuse the odd energy building between them, she pulled out his note. “Where’d you learn to write like this?” she asked, thumb brushing across the soft indents in the cardstock where his pen had pressed down to shape the beautifully scrolled letters of her name.

 

“It was a hobby, growing up,” Ben replied. He sounded a little defensive about it; she found that unreasonably endearing. The fault lines made him human, unlike his tony club with its dark wood paneling and enormous sofas and (alleged) longest bar in the city. Rey wondered what kind of childhood he’d had, and then wondered why she cared.

 

“Cool,” she said, sliding the last mouthful of Rocky Road towards him and not making eye contact. “So do you ever do, like, rude messages in calligraphy?”

 

He did, though Ben’s rude tended more towards the dirty-sentimental: she found _Life is hard, and love, a little sweetness in between_ tucked inside her purse after he ate her out on her futon before work.

 

“You seem chipper,” observed Luke that afternoon as they finished compiling the last of the code to update BB-8’s topic model. “What’s the occasion?”

 

Rey jumped. “Oh, you know,” she said nonsensically, “Nothing. Just life, in general, I guess?”

 

Luke looked like she’d just sprouted an extra head. “Right,” he said, rolling his eyes, and made himself scarce around her workspace for the rest of the week.

 

*

 

“Rey?” Ben repeats. “What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

 

His voice sounds sleepy and concerned, a physical hook reaching across space and time to rip her open at the seams, bleeding memory. “I’m in D.C.” _hic._ “I met your mom yesterday.”

 

There. Now it’s out in the open. She closes her eyes and imagines what he looks like, face probably contorted from cycling through emotions: surprise, confusion, irritation, fury.

 

“Are you - are you drunk right now?” he asks.

 

Rey thinks back to the bar with Jyn. “Getting there,” she decides, before realizing how pathetic that makes her seem. “I’m at an academic expo. She just showed up.”

 

Ben hums. “Sounds like Leia.”

 

Rey waits for him to demand answers as to why she’s talking with his mother, when in the past that subject has been a no-fly zone buried under 50 feet of emotional barbed wire, dead dove: do not eat, etc etc. “Don’t you want to know why?”

 

“I think I can guess, considering that she paid me an unscheduled visit too last week,” says Ben. The liquid of his voice stills and frosts over as he clarifies, “I can’t discuss the First Order, Rey. I signed an NDA with the Department of Defense. Leia shouldn’t have even approached you about this.”

 

The brush-off is professional, appropriate. A casual but crystal clear reminder that somewhere along the intervening five years of mutual silence, they’ve gone from sharing ice cream and playful letters about cunnilingus to _Congratulations on the promotion_ and _I signed an NDA_. With as much dignity as she can muster, Rey clears her throat and nods to herself. “I see. Well, guess it was worth a try. I’ll let Leia know, and, uh, thanks for the flowers-”

 

“That’s it?”

 

Ben sounds irrationally offended. It makes a frisson of anger slide down Rey’s spine. “Yeah,” she bites out. “I think you made it pretty clear that that was the end of the conversation, so I’m gonna get back to -” Taking advantage of the open bar and avoiding the sleazy dudes from Dartmouth. “- networking with my peers at this conference.”

 

“There are other ways you could try and convince me,” Ben insists. Realizing a second after Rey splutters what that sounded like, he mumbles, “I _meant_ , just, we can’t talk about specific First Order projects. But if you wanted to have a...broader philosophical or moral debate about research ethics, I would be interested in that.”

 

“You would be interested,” Rey repeats, unable to keep the disbelief out of her voice, “in having a debate. About _research ethics_.”

 

“We could do it over Facetime or Skype, but in person would probably be less awkward.”

 

“Oh, you think?” It’s not like her to be facetious, but this is without question the dumbest idea she’s ever heard.

 

“I’ll come to wherever you are,” Ben promises. “I’ll meet you anywhere in the city. Or outside of it.”

 

This is not the conversation they should be having. This is the way they used to talk, back when there was magic in the accidental brush of their legs under a table and terrifying honesty in the thunder of his heartbeat when she rested her head against his chest. “Then you should let Senator Organa know,” Rey dodges. “Or Luke. They’d be more than willing and qualified to debate the implications of whatever it is you’re working on.”

 

“I have nothing left to say to Leia or Luke,” Ben says. “But there are still a lot of things I’d like to tell you.”

*

One of the side effects of joining AHCH-TO’s core faculty is that Rey gets a new title and Luke gets a convenient excuse to exempt himself from “distractions”, like updating their IRBs or checking in with the lab manager about finances or hiring new research assistants so Dean Holdo doesn’t shut down their lab for being more of a private lair that Luke uses to work through his personal issues.

 

“ _Managing Director_ ,” he shouts from behind the closed door of his office the third time she brings in prospective rotation students to meet with him. “ _That means you’re the one who gets to manage this stuff_.”

 

“He’s usually not like this,” Rey apologizes to the wide-eyed first-year PhDs, even as she imagines new and creative ways to murder her former thesis advisor. Clapping her hands together, she pivots toward the opposite end of the lab and says in her cheeriest voice, “Now, who wants to learn more about some of the improvements we’re hoping to make in semi-supervised droid learning?”

 

Against all odds, they end up with two students who elect to do part of their rotations at AHCH-TO: James, a nervy-looking Midwestern transplant fresh out of undergrad at Caltech, and Veronica, who’s international by way of Shanghai and seems blissfully oblivious to the moony eyes James makes at her while they’re both outlining project timelines on the whiteboard.

 

“I came to here to study under Dr. Skywalker,” Veronica tells Rey in heavily accented English during their get-to-know-you lunch at the Lebanese sandwich shop a stone’s throw away from campus. “His work transformed life for my family. The mines are much safer and more productive now. My mother has even been promoted to bot maintenance.” She has huge, shining eyes and long expressive fingers that she uses to emphasize her point.

 

“That’s really nice,” Rey says, swallowing down a big bite of her falafel wrap.

 

It’s always weird to be reminded that for so many, Luke Skywalker is a pioneer and visionary in the landscape of interactive robotics, that his breakthrough 3PO and R2 models revolutionized what people thought was possible with AI at an industrial level. During one point of her life Rey was pulled in by the light of that legacy as well, but any flicker of awe she once held for the man has long been tempered by the day-to-day reality of working under Luke, who drinks kombucha like it’s giving something back to him and doles out wisdom in erratic, halting bursts when he’s not holed up in his office working on lord knows what. The brutal asceticism of his academic and personal life - aside from that _thing_ with Mara from the Chemistry department which Rey tries hard to know nothing about - sometimes feels like a rebuff of the same beliefs that she privately holds for their work: that one day, it will change things and make people’s lives better, less lonely, more hopeful.

 

“So how’s life in the ivory tower?” Finn asks during their weekly coffee meetup next to his workplace. He’d had his pick of postdoc and private industry offers around the country even before successfully defending his thesis, but had chosen to stick close to Rose, who was still in Holdo’s lab.

 

“It’s all right. We recently got a couple new rotation students.” Rey smiles at the memory of James tripping over BB-8 as Veronica floated by, coming up red-faced and apologizing profusely to the furious bleeping droid. “Oh, Hux seems weirder than usual? He’s also missed the last couple committee meetings we’re both supposed to be on. Rumor has it that he might jump ship to a university in Russia that’s willing to make him a tenure offer.”

 

Finn snorts. “Good for him. Maybe he’ll take Phasma with him.”

  
They part ways with a hug and a promise to text about plans for the engagement party. For a split second, Rey considers telling him about her call with Ben, but before she can come to a decision Finn’s already bounding away, head full of dreams about the future and the line of his back straight and strong under the clear California sun, so Rey keeps her own counsel during their goodbye and continues keeping it for the rest of the day as she runs around AHCH-TO, making BB-8 play pranks on an increasingly-terrified James and trying not to commit homicidal acts on Luke's person after he forwards her another 20 emails with the subject line: [URGENT] - ACTION REQUIRED.


	4. Chapter 4

In all fairness, it’s not like Rey sets out to keep it a secret.

 

Being locked in for another 7 years before she’s up for tenure review means there are G1s to supervise and university committee members to network with and one week where BB-8 just flat out refuses to cooperate on test runs until Veronica figures out that his slightly crooked antenna is the source of the problem. Rey starts ordering a lot from Grubhub, sacrificing two decades of thriftiness for the convenience of not having to drag herself to the grocery store at 1 am when she finally manages to escape lab.

 

“Maybe you should try meditation,” Luke suggests after Rey wonders out loud whether it's possible to requisition lab funds for a laundry machine in the name of expediting scientific discovery.

 

So she and Ben don't end up talking a lot, but they do talk. Despite spending almost every waking moment thinking about robots, Rey isn't one herself, and research gets pretty fucking lonely sometimes. They didn't mention that part in grad school - or maybe they did, but she failed to internalize it because anywhere outside the gnawing, pre-Finn years in Jakku had seemed spectacular by comparison. The truth is that there is always one more week to “just get through”, one more award she should apply for because it might help her stand out among the crop when she comes up for tenure, and when Rey takes an honest step back, she has to admit that arguing with Ben for an hour after everyone else has left lab for the night keeps her from feeling quite so untethered, a boat bobbing far from shore.

 

“Why do you do it?” she asks, when they’ve exhausted their usual verbal sparring repertoire on the personal privacy vs public security trade-off for a third time. Leia Organa would be sorely disappointed by the progress Rey's made in changing her son's mind - hunched over a revise and resubmit manuscript on her laptop, halfheartedly addressing reviewer comments while Ben watches her over Skype.

 

“Why do I do what?” asks Ben.

 

“You know.”  Rey waves her hand to encapsulate “all the CEO stuff. The meetings and dinners, all the press conferences. Everything that takes away from actual research.”

 

“Careful, you're starting to sound like Luke. And thanks for the vote of confidence in my people skills.”

 

“You’re welcome.”

 

“I find your lack of faith disturbing.”

 

“ _Three_ of the associates on your old team quit after a week.”

 

“Actually, it was five.” Ben grins. “Keep up, sweetheart.”

 

Rey stabs at the keyboard so hard she feels plastic crunch.

 

“Bold of you to assume that I’d want to,” she mutters, good humor gone up in smoke.

 

On screen, Ben leans forward intently, ridiculous shoulders blotting out his background. “Is that what the problem was, Rey? You thought I wouldn't wait for you?”

 

Wouldn’t, didn't. “I’d rather not get into this right now,” she says, forcing an airiness into the words that she emphatically does not feel.

 

A pause; Ben's jaw works audibly in frustration. “Why do you do  _this_ then? The whole academia rat race?”

 

It's fair play: a question for a question, an eye for an eye. Rey hasn’t washed her hair in ages and her shirt has a penny-sized hole in the collar from a tragic incident with the dryer - this probably isn’t the best impression of the moral high ground she could be presenting to Ben Solo. Ben, who looks every inch the millionaire Silicon Valley exec he became, all crisp power tie and bespoke dark suit.

 

“I believe in research for the sake of research itself,” she intones. “It’s important to address fundamental questions in the field so we can create the knowledge base to translate scientific discoveries into real-world applications.”

 

“And why do you really do it?”

 

Through the mirror of her laptop screen darkly, Rey sees herself look sad, in the way she supposes people look sad when they’re forced by messy breakups and classified, top-secret military projects to make small talk with someone who used to love them.

 

“Because it's what I'm good at.”

 

*

According to public record, Project VADER was an attempt by various US intelligence agencies in the 50s and 60s to harness the burgeoning power of computers and build a sort of digital panopticon. Work stalled due to a lack of sufficiently advanced technology to collect and process such large amounts of data, and the effort was ultimately abandoned in its theoretical stages. Still, VADER persists as a popular bogeyman among internet privacy circles; occasionally, some tech wonk blog will make a passing reference to it and trigger a flame war in the comments section over the feasibility and desirability of such a tool in the present day.

 

“Well isn't this a surprise,” Hux says when he catches Rey chatting up one of his postdocs in the cafeteria, trying to fish for information on how Hux’s research fits into what Leia described as First Order Technology's holy grail.

 

Matt, who is blond, rowed crew in college, and looks it, actually  _squeaks_ before vanishing in a puff of polite apologies.  

 

“Hello there,” says Rey, turning around. “Are you going to that meeting on-”

 

“Developed an interest in my research, have you?”

 

Hux's grudges are legendary for their depth and loathing; there's a reason why his grad students are universally pitied by everyone else in the department. Finn lost a chunk of hair from the thinly veiled harassment when he finally switched labs. Logically, Rey knows that Hux's vindictiveness probably springs from deep-seated imposter syndrome; in practice, she flashes him her most blank and bored look of confusion.

 

“Just giving Matt some positive feedback - he looks like he could use it.”

 

Hux smiles at her. There's nothing friendly behind it.

 

“I see. Your own students must be lucky to have such an attentive advisor.”

 

Rey holds up her hands and backs away, apologetic. “Sorry, didn't mean to step on any toes.”

 

Hux evidently doesn't believe her, because he actually shows up to the next committee meeting on undergraduate course requirements and rips all her suggestions to confetti.

 

“Like I said,” Rose sighs as she wax-seals another wedding invitation shut, “Irredeemable douchebag. Head so far up his ass I'm not sure how he breathes.”

 

“He must have his own insecurities,” Rey insists.

 

“Hard to imagine when nothing stands out about him in the first place.”

 

“I love you,” Finn says dreamily, shoving fistfuls of glitter into Phasma's envelope across the kitchen table.

 

*

“I love you,” Ben gasped as he fucked into Rey from behind. “I missed you.”

 

They were up against the hallway that connected Ben's front door to his kitchen, too excited to find a proper horizontal surface. Sun-browned fingers tangled with her own along the stucco wall. Work had taken Ben to Texas for two weeks, where he sent daily email missives containing cruel and unusual character defamations of his coworkers.

 

The rucked-up hem of Rey’s dress - “Easy access”, she'd smirked in the car - bunched and shifted along her lower back in time with Ben's shallow, efficient thrusts. Sometime in the past few months he'd gotten her orgasms down to a science; five minutes later, Rey shivered and felt herself start to cum in lazy, rolling waves, a bone-deep sweetness breaking onto shore magnified by Ben's answering groan and tightening fingers at her hips.

 

“How was Dallas?” she asked after they cleaned up and ventured out in search of groceries to refill Ben's fridge. Currently, it contained: one elderly box of Chinese take-out.

 

“Hot and crowded,” said Ben. “How's lab?”

 

Rey shrugged. “BB-8 only shocked me twice this week. At this rate, I may actually graduate on time.”

 

In truth, it was a lot of waiting around for Luke to finish making edits to the topics she'd proposed for her qualifying exam. He'd been on a mentoring kick lately, asking to meet twice a week and forwarding her dense, theoretical papers in Russian and Swedish that took hours to decipher.

 

“You know you can join me any time,” Ben said, pushing the shopping cart towards the dairy aisle. “You’d have your choice of projects at First Order, and the benefits are -”

 

“Amazing, I know.” Ben’s office had a 24-hour spa and sparkling gym right across the hall, which no employees ever seemed to use. Rey nudged his side. “Except you hate your job.”

 

“Everyone hates their job sometimes.”

 

“Mm, better the devil I know then.”

 

Ben turned away to grab some yogurt off the shelf. Like a polar north, Rey’s fingers twitched towards his unconsciously, but retreated when Ben turned around and plunked a container of whole fat Greek yogurt next to the carton of strawberries. Clearing her throat, she added, “Anyway, BB-8 would never forgive me if I abandoned him in the middle of my PhD program.”

 

Ben’s hands flexed around the handlebar of the shopping cart. She wanted him to smile or laugh at her, to make a wry, fond joke about getting off academic high horses. Instead he said, “I really like doing this with you, Rey.”

 

The admission hovered between them, earnest and bewildering. 

 

“All of it,” Ben clarified. “Grocery shopping, watching that insane History Channel show about the extraterrestrials, everything's more -” He turned left to avoid the pyramid of seasonal charcuterie platters. “Sorry, I just thought about it a lot when I was away." The tips of his ears burned pink. "You should stay over tonight."

 

And how she, how was anyone supposed to respond to that kind of declaration, other than “Um, all right” and “Wait, we forgot the cereal.”

 

The next morning Ben dropped her off at AHCH-TO, an hour late and garbed in the finery of yesterday's clothes. “Sure I can’t tempt you?” he asked, carding fingers through her wind-snarled hair; he knew all her weaknesses. "Just think about it: flexible work hours. Free catered breakfast.” 

 

“Stop it,” she laughed, ducking away. “I’m happy here. And the Keurig works just fine, despite its occasional performance anxiety.”

 

“I'll buy you a new coffee machine. I'll  _build_ you one."

 

"Jesus, let it go."

 

In hindsight, that had been the first omen: the brief shuttering in Ben’s eyes when she closed the car door,  hybrid engine rumbling a low and powerful bass as he peeled out of the parking lot without looking back - distant but unmistakable, like the clap of thunder before lightning.


	5. Chapter 5

Rey hates, hates, hates wellness lectures.

 

There's something darkly ironic about a culture that glorifies 80 hour workweeks and being the last person to leave lab every night also mandating attendance at a 6pm talk about relaxation and work-life balance that’s on the other side of campus. Rey arrives 15 minutes late and folds herself origami-style to fit between Kaydel Connix and Bodhi Rook in the packed seminar room. Her eyes grow heavy as the university rep starts flipping through creatively animated Powerpoint slides about mindfulness strategies to prevent burnout and eat healthier; it's mostly superfluous, given that they should all just be titled “How not to be a legal liability if/when you choose to have a mental breakdown.”

 

“Hey.” Someone nudges her. “They're giving out freebies.”

 

Rey jerks back into wakefulness just as a basket of foil packets lands in her lap. “What are these?”

 

“Face masks.” Kaydel reaches across and picks one with pictures of lemons and oranges decorating the front. “My girlfriend loves watching beauty videos on this stuff. They're relaxing and smell nice.”

 

Rey reads the back of a lime-coconut scented package that promises a soothing, hydrating, rejuvenated glow to reduce acne scarring and take all her worries away. “Better work fast then,” she hears Bodhi grumble.

 

It doesn't, not really, but it's a nice treat after she makes it home before midnight for the first time in recent memory. Rey decides to do the whole nine yards: she unearths and lights a scented candle from the last Skywalker lab Secret Santa, sets a pot of tea to boil, and puts on the crooning, golden strains of Sinatra before sinking back into her futon and letting the sheet mask do its thing.

 

It's just starting to tingle a bit when Ben FaceTimes her.

 

“Oh my god,” he says flatly when she accepts the call out of reflex. “What are you doing?”

 

“Hello to you too,” she replies, eyes still closed. “I'm going to need a moment. This thing's supposed to stay on for another five minutes.”

 

She waits for Ben to say something about looking like a serial killer - personally, Rey thinks she has the cheekbones of Hannibal Lecter - but he remains surprisingly, obediently quiet as the seconds tick past. No static crackles down the line; no phone of the CEO of First Order Technologies would dare have connectivity issues. Rey forces herself to pull her attention back inwards and take a centering breath just like the wellness rep said: _one in, one out._ The face mask smells like a dense, lush tropical paradise. She’s being soothed. She’s being hydrated. She’s fucking relaxed. After a geologic era yet seemingly no time at all, her timer app goes off.

 

Peeling off the sheet mask and wiping away its damp residue with one hand, she finally looks at Ben. A journalist who profiled him for WIRED Magazine once likened his face to a public monument, which was hilarious at the time but feels disturbingly accurate now that he's filling up her phone screen with his long nose and powerful brow and intense eyes hooded from amusement. “Since when are you into skincare?” he asks.

 

Rey tries not to take the disbelieving tone personally. _Don't be so sensitive, Johnson_ , she reminds herself. That had been half the problem towards the end: every action got played back and overanalyzed until it became a perceived slight against her or her work, another shard working itself deeper underneath the baseline amounts of crippling insecurity that grad school handed you alongside your annual research stipend.

 

“It’s self-care,” she says airily.

 

Ben snorts, which has the enormously unfair effect of making him look good enough to eat while also spit roasting her heart. How long has it been since they were able to make each other laugh? “So what’s next,” he says, “Glitter bath bombs? Infusing your Brita water filter with slices of fruit?”

 

“I may be a millennial but I’ll never be _that_ bougie,” Rey says in mock horror. “This just smells nice. And all the hydrocolloid mumbo jumbo is probably doing my skin a favor.”

 

Ben frowns. “Your skin is fine.”

 

She cringes. “Sorry, wasn’t trying to fish for compliments there.” She wouldn’t consider herself particularly vain, but like all terminally straight women Rey has a couple of physical hang-ups that she’s irrationally self-conscious about, including a childhood history of mild sun damage and acne flare-ups before she moved to a major West Coast city and was introduced to the concept of dermatologists and sunscreen outside the beach.

 

“That's not what I meant,” Ben says. “It’s your business. Just - you don't need to change on someone else’s account.”

 

The sentiment stings like a paper cut. She swallows, willing herself not to bark out a laugh at the irony of the situation. “Well you too then. If we're doing the whole validating and empowering each other thing.”

 

He smirks. “Beats trying to appeal to my sense of civic responsibility.”

 

Rey knows that what she should do is cut her losses and wash her hands of this whole VADER business, let Ben and Leia Organa duke it out over backroom meetings or dramatic Senate floor speeches or however it is the rich and influential make decisions for the rest of the world, but she just hasn't managed to quite go through with it yet. Really, she thinks, how long before Ben stops calling on his own anyway; there’s never been a shortage of people and projects to occupy his attention, and in the meantime why does it matter if he chooses to fill all the bored, lonely hours of his very busy life halfheartedly defending his technocratic plan for world domination while watching her putter around lab tinkering with BB8 or trying on face masks.

 

For now, she likes the way he looks at her through the pixels of her phone screen: with careful focus and consideration, maybe a hint of bewilderment. He's right about one thing at least: this went beyond VADER and research ethics weeks ago, ages ago.

 

“Why do you hate your family?” she blurts out.

 

From the scarce amount he'd let slip while they dated, she had pictured his parents as charismatic narcissists, the kind of mealy-mouthed country club members who’d insist that she messed up the wiring in their Bentley and demand a refund while sneering around Unkar Plutt's garage in $6000 of menswear, bottle-blond wives clutching the arm of their Jesuit prep school-educated toddler like a particularly troublesome accessory.

 

“I don't hate them,” says Ben. “Well, besides Luke.”

 

“Then what's with the-” Textbook attachment disorder behavior, she’s tempted to say, but that seems kind of hypocritical given that she'd believed her parents were really stranded in Cuba on a business trip until she was fourteen.

 

“My mom and dad, they just couldn't be bothered unless it was convenient for them.” Ben's voice is very even.  “Luke was pretty much the same way until I became more threatening than useful to his career.”

 

“Threatening.”

 

“Too independent. Not committed enough to his own research vision, whatever.”

 

“Oh,” Rey says, “I’m sorry, I didn't-”

 

“He was also going to leave me off the paper that was supposed to be the cornerstone for _my_ job talk. It was a pretty easy decision to walk away after that.”

 

“I see,” she says, and then because this is more dirt on Luke pre AHCH-TO and sabbatical and dissolution of the JEDI research group than she's ever managed to glean via the academic whisper network, she tugs at her bun and says, “Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?”

 

He shrugs. “You really think we needed another thing to argue about?”

 

“That's not - I wouldn't have said that was an okay thing for Luke to do.”

 

“And yet you're still so dedicated to his new lab. Running yourself ragged taking care of everyone else while he gets credit for your accomplishments.”

 

“He was the original PI, of course he-” Rey rubs her temples and sighs. “I seem to recall that we've had this conversation several times in the past.”

 

“Probably,” Ben agrees. His eyes dip before glancing somewhere off screen; tentatively, almost like a peace offering, he says, “That droid of yours - I had some ideas last week about how to fix its job shop scheduling algorithm.”

 

Rey’s eyes pop open in surprise. “You spend a lot of time thinking about other people’s problems?” she asks.

 

“Only when they’re interesting. It’s the classic readers-writers dilemma shifted to a new context. There are software techniques First Order uses in real-time processor scheduling that you could apply, but.” He stops, mouth curling in amusement. “Like you said, it’s your problem.”

 

Rey fumbles to grab a notebook and pencil off the pile overtaking her end table. “No, no, sorry,” she says, “can you walk me through the logic?”

  
Crap, she realizes an hour later after ending the call with three new potential leads to pursue and a minor breakthrough of her own on efficiency optimization that Ben had made an impressed noise at. So now she's not only failed to convince him to halt work on his eye-in-the-sky 1984 vanity project of doom, they're also engaging in intellectual foreplay. She thought they'd burned that bridge between them five years ago; as it turns out, somewhere between his earnest nerd love for scientific discovery and breathing rarefied air with other titans of the tech industry, his billions of dollars in secret government contracts, Ben still remembers exactly how to coax her in from the cold and leave her confused and wanting on the doorstep, silently dreading when the other shoe drops.

 

*

 

AHCH-TO isn't the type of lab that does holiday parties, so when Thanksgiving break rolls around, Rey debates whether to come in for some uninterrupted work time or spend the weekend burrowed under blankets watching the latest season of _Ancient Aliens_ for scientific inaccuracies.

 

“What are you talking about?” Finn says. “I thought you were bringing the pot roast for dinner this year.”

 

Rey picks at a loose thread unraveling from the cuff of her button-up, feeling unaccountably shy. “Well, I thought you and Rose might have different plans than the usual.”

 

She's always been a bit of a hoarder - not the type that gets their own reality TV show, but fretful and secretive, squirreling away snack packs and water bottles in her old bedroom at Plutt’s house for when he'd disappear for days at a time or forget to pay the utility bill. One side effect from never having enough of anything - food, money, affection, friends - is that she's embarrassingly greedy and has to work hard at hiding it: forcing herself to let someone else take the last brownie at a research talk, or making sure to be extra conscientious about respecting Finn-Rose time so as not to come off as the needy female friend. Emotional pack-rat tendencies aside, Rey knows that it's easier to be the person with one foot out the door first, easier to choose rather than wait to be chosen.

 

Which makes it all the more embarrassing when Finn's face creases in understanding and he sighs, “Oh, _Rey._ ”

 

“Did you say pot roast? I can do the pot roast,” she mutters. “I'm thinking an orange-lime and rosemary marinade - that okay?”

 

“Yeah, of course.” He hesitates and then places a hand on her shoulder, five solid bands of warmth bleeding through cotton. “Listen, I know that Rose and I are getting married next year. But you and me, we're a done deal. No matter who we're dating or how busy our lives get, I've got your back. And I want you and your fucking amazing pot roast at this Thanksgiving dinner, so please ditch lab for one day and come, okay?”

 

Rey waves him off, chin wobbling. “All right, if you insist.”

 

It turns out to be a surprisingly good time; she was  happy splitting a cheese pizza with Finn when they were two broke college grads with no parents to stop them from driving across the country in a patch-job freighter she hotwired from Unkar's chop shop, but she's even happier eating pigs-in-a-blanket and little onion feta pastry bites while gathered around a laptop with Rose and Jessika, trying to snipe all the best Black Friday deals on bridesmaid’s dresses.

 

“I cannot you believe you invited that woman to your wedding,” Jessika says as they toggle between a dozen tabs of identical-looking gauzy gowns in various shades of champagne and lilac. “You _know_ she had a thing for Finn the whole time he was in Hux's lab.”

 

“It's not like I thought Phasma would actually accept,” Rose whines at the same time that Rey chokes and almost drops her paper plate.

 

“No way. Seriously?” she asks.

 

Jessika rolls her eyes and shrugs in answer, as if the news that Phasma might want to hit it with - God - her best friend isn't the most disturbing and improbable piece of gossip from this past century.

 

“But,” says Rey, floundering, “they really, really hate each other.”

 

“Enmity can be a powerful aphrodisiac.”

 

Rose nods sagely. “Very powerful. I could see her packing some serious heat as a dominatrix type.”

 

“The real question though - is Hux an S or an M?” says Jessika. “My money’s on the latter, but only in secret.”

 

Rey covers her ears. “Oh my god.”

 

“What about Hux?” Finn asks, poking his head out from the kitchen. He's wearing a “Kiss the Cook” apron and holding a long wooden spoon in one hand with his hair tied up in a messy man bun; Rey cannot believe this is the same guy she found squatting in the library basement’s study lounge freshman year, eating Pop Tarts from the vending machine and dressing in stretched-out basketball shorts.

 

“Nothing,” Rose chirps. “Love you, baby.”

 

Finn squints at the three of them suspiciously but says nothing.

 

After dinner, where they collectively demolish the pot roast along with a mountain of mashed potatoes and four different types of pie, Rose raises her glass and says, “All character defamation that has gone on tonight aside-”

 

“Here here,” someone says, banging a spoon against the table.

 

“-I’d like to be real for a moment and say how grateful I am for all of you.”

 

“It’s okay, we know Finn’s your favorite,” Jess yells from the sofa.

 

“ _Almost_ all of you,” Rose amends, but she finishes her toast about focusing on the good instead of dwelling on the bad with a chaste peck to Finn’s lips and a shy “Thank you for making my year - my life.” It’s so genuinely lovely that Rey has to duck into the bathroom and bawl for a minute from a tender sadness she can’t even begin to explain; she blames that moment of temporary weakness for why she ends up letting Rose and Jess peer pressure her into having an opinion on cap sleeves and hair accessories while the guys do dishes. Finn rescues her just as they’re moving onto the apparently contentious issue of flower crowns for the wedding reception, thereby proving his worthiness as a friend.

 

December slides between the city's ribs like a knife. It's an unseasonably cold winter for the West Coast; Rey wakes up one morning to find frost creeping up the panes of her windows in fractal patterns, strange and beautiful. James starts wearing leg warmers to lab; even Luke trades in his usual socks and sandals combo for a pair of fleece-lined boots.  

 

The dress arrives while she's submitting a minor grant proposal and drinking a thermos of sweet tea. It shivers when she shakes it out of its tissue paper packaging, the silk lining like water against her fingertips. After a lifetime of moving around in beat-up jeans and loose-fitting shirts, Rey feels faintly ridiculous peeling it all off for the delicate hug of pink lace and tulle, a starburst of silver beading at the waist, but Rose had been so pleased with the purchase that Rey can't help but feel impressed by the dress’s effect as well after she tries it on. She looks sweet, almost dainty, in a way that reminds her of the soft sorority girls at Jakku State: shiny-haired and used to owning nice things.

 

Rey's most valuable possessions are her books: Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke, Adams, yellowed paperbacks gone feathery-soft at the edges from being thumbed through on long bus rides and underneath bed covers, crowded up against gas station knick knacks and framed diplomas for space along her bookshelf. She's dropped them into puddles, scooped them up off of dirty subway floors, re-taped torn pages, painstakingly constructed paper bag book covers. Her parents’ abandonment; Unkar's tempestuous moods - Rey crunched it all up like a soda can at the junkyard so she could crawl and live inside stories about hope and adventure and not struggling in vain, a future just around the corner.

 

For her 24th birthday, Ben took her to a strip mall in Santa Clara on the western end of El Camino Real where a cozy-looking woman served them simmering cauldrons of hearty ox bone soup, mountains of spicy-sweet beef short ribs cut with scissors, an endless procession of mouth-scouring soju cups interspersed with tiny tapioca and red bean pancakes, chewy and just barely sweet. “Best Korean food in the Bay area right here,” Ben had promised; it's one of the few things she regrets letting him keep in the wake of their breakup. Afterwards, tipsy and sated, they'd wandered into a local bookstore, where Rey pointed at a glossy row of novels from the _Robot_ series and said, “One day I want to make it all real, you know? Not just a story.”

 

It was the kind of thing she’d joked about before with Finn, easily said and easily laughed off. Ben seemed to take her seriously, face sharpening into an impressed smile. “You will. If anyone can, it’ll be you.” Handing over his credit card, he said, “Buy as many books as you like.”

 

More than his frequently vocalized appreciation for her lips or narrow waist or neat handful of tits, more than a $250 bridesmaid’s dress from Adrianna Papell, that had made Rey feel incandescently pretty, gone supernova inside-out from happiness. She'd flushed, turning away to inspect a display of _The Murderbot Diaries_ with exaggerated concentration that morphed into genuine absorption; Ben just sat on a nearby stool and watched her fondly, a content tilt to his head, chin resting on one large palm and as perfectly at peace with the universe as she'd ever seen him.  

 

She's thinking about that of all things when Finn calls to freak out about meeting Rose's parents for the first time over Christmas.

 

“Seriously?” she asks. “This is like the blind leading the blind.”

 

“Ha ha, orphan jokes, hilarious,” Finn grouses. “Now, please help me pick an appropriately expensive visiting gift so they like me.”

 

“I don't understand why you think I know about these things,” she insists, painting another coat of blush pink onto her nails while she waits for Veronica and James to finish putting BB8 through his weekly test run, “but would a nice bottle of wine work? You could wrap it with ribbon and everything. And cheese. Fancy cheese.”

 

“Do you think that says ‘reliable guy who you can trust to provide for your daughter’?”

 

“First of all, Rose would be pissed at you if she heard that. Second of all, don't you think trying to bribe your future in-laws into liking you is kind of weird?”

 

“Maybe one of those fruit bouquets would look better.”

 

“Please don't bring them an edible arrangement,” Rey says. “Just please don't ever do that.”

 

*

 

The first blow-up happened over dinner, red-garbed servers moving silently, efficiently around the table as they laid out entrees. Rey tried not to squirm in the tight black dress she’d squeezed into. Somehow, when Ben said they were getting a meal with his boss, she’d expected something a little less intimate than a mansion in one of the ritzier gated communities of Palo Alto with a security system that would make the Pentagon spontaneously orgasm.

 

“Perhaps you’re considering a career shift,” said William Snoke, founder and CEO of First Order Technologies. The front of his gold robe gaped open as he leaned forward, exposing a map of surgical scar lines across radiation-sunken skin.

 

“Not really,” Rey said.

 

“She’s got amazing potential,” Ben said. “Her dissertation is going to blow everyone else out of the water.”

 

Snoke’s lip curled. “You must walk on it too, from the way my apprentice speaks of you.” He steepled his fingers. “Please, tell me about what Luke Skywalker’s been working on all these years. I’ve been ever so curious. I never expected him to have such a lovely young assistant.”

 

“Of course,” Rey said thinly. “Most projects are still in the experimental stage, but if you check our website-” She didn’t remember what else she said to stall and brush him off, but Snoke smiled less the longer she went on, so she must have done a shitty job of it.

 

“You wasted his time,” Ben said in the car on the way back.

 

“I thought the feeling was mutual,” Rey said.

 

“I wanted him to see how talented you are. He could be your mentor too, you know. He could really help your career.”

 

“I came for _you,_ ” Rey snapped. “I’m your girlfriend, not some prospective employee.”

 

“If you were an employee, you would’ve been fired by now,” Ben muttered.

 

Rey twisted to look out the window. “What’s this then? A performance review?”

 

“You _embarrassed_ me,” he exploded, hissing, as the car leapt forward. Street lamps and low-slung suburban houses blurred past. “I've been talking you up to Snoke for months, and then you just-”

 

Rey didn't hear the rest of it, didn’t hear anything beyond the roar of blood in her ears and the dull stutter of her heart. Ben’s words filled her with an awful coldness. He’d cut to the quick with three careless words and now rage was oozing out, ugly and icy-hot, pooling sick in her stomach.

 

She remembered later that Ben tried to stop her from leaving the car. The first three times, he shook his head and frowned. It was only when she started yelling to be let out that his eyes grew round with alarm; when she threw the car into park he cursed as the tires crunched into curb; when she opened the passenger door and bolted the last few blocks to her apartment he called after her, making lights flick on in the windows of the surrounding houses.

 

She’d fallen asleep crying in a threadbare old college T-shirt lettered with _And god said let there be Maxwell’s equations_ as Finn rubbed a soothing palm up and down her back, whispering, “I’m sorry Rey, I’m so sorry.”

 

The fight wasn’t all bad. Ben took a week off work to haunt her doorstep, which resulted in five screaming matches, three noise complaints from the neighbors, and one incredibly embarrassing visit from two officers of the Palo Alto Police Department, who looked somewhat put-out that no one had slapped the other person or thrown anything heavy enough to cause property damage. By the end, they were both red-eyed and hoarse, emotions strip-mined down to raw exposed nerve endings. But Ben had apologized too, murmuring over and over that he was sorry, that of course she’d always be more than enough, that he’d go to therapy, whatever she wanted, just please let him in, let him try again with her.

 

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Finn had said while they finalized their submission to the AAAI conference in Honolulu.

 

“You and me both,” Rey said.

 

“Why do you even still like him?”

 

“He just has the most sparkling personality.”

 

In truth, she was too shy to explain it. Finn might have been the first person to care about her but Ben was the first who genuinely seemed to _need_ her around: doubling back to steal more kisses in the morning, finding her across the room at work events and socials, following her around his apartment during a heated debate over whether Orson Scott Card the racist homophobic bigot could be rightfully separated from Orson Scott Card, literary genius who redefined the subgenre of wunderkind child soldiers fighting epic space battles. In a thousand moments and places, he’d always come back for her. Things had mostly tiptoed back to the status quo when they were together, and Ben had ceased trying to recruit her to his company or talking about his boss - which was just as well, since as far as Rey was concerned Snoke was a Me Too scandal waiting to happen, if the pancreatic cancer didn’t get him first. They went on dates, they had sex, he tried his best to be sensitive and reassuring while she ranted about research, she read articles on _Recode_ to try and understand his work. It was complicated, it was simple.

 

And then one afternoon they came back from a hiking trip to hundreds of text messages and calls blowing up Ben’s phone.

  
The warmth of the day seemed to dissolve into the dull background of watching Ben pace around the small parking lot, talking in strained, urgent tones with multiple people while the sun grew rounder and more orange as it dipped below the treeline. Rey heard snatches of nonsensical phrases like “UCSF Medical Center” and “handover” and “that project belongs to _me_ you fucking goblin asshole”. And it was all a lot of worry and wait until Ben finally lowered his phone, turning around to face her with a childlike look of lost bewilderment as he said, “That was Hux. Snoke is - he’s dead”, followed by, “the board just voted to make me interim CEO”.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I know this is one my least popular/read fics but I want to finish these characters' story arcs before moving onto the rest of my WIPs. The rest of the fic is all plotted out and hopefully will be complete by the end of February! :)


	6. Chapter 6

When Veronica and James burst into her office in a windmill of arms and breathless exclamations, Rey has to listen for several minutes before she finally says, “Wait, so this is all because of Reddit _?_ ”

 

“ _Yes,_ ” they chorus.

 

Just then Luke pokes his head through her doorway, looking annoyed and suspicious and deeply wronged as he waves around his phone. “Rey, why are NPR and Vox calling me? Did you give out my number to some reporter?”

 

“I have no idea what’s going on,” she says, at the same time as James chirps, “BB-8’s become a meme, sir” and Veronica shrugs helplessly.

 

The long story, which Rey manages to piece together between furiously texting six group chats and wading into the log flume of academic Twitter, is that someone posted to a link to their latest paper on adaptive preferences algorithms to r/science, which has since been shared over 370,000 times on various social media outlets along with videos of BB-8 from AHCH-TO’s Instagram account captioned “I for one welcome our new robot overlords”. Luke makes occasional outraged noises as he reads through the most upvoted comments, ranging from “That’s not how machine learning works!” to “What the hell is Black Mirror?”

 

“Maybe we’ll get to be on TV,” Veronica suggests, a wistful look in her eyes.

 

Rey has a sudden, blindingly horrible vision of Luke responding to a shiny-haired news anchor’s fifth joke about WALL-E and Daleks. “Maybe not.”

 

“Actually,” says the liaison from the university’s Office of Media and Communications a couple hours later while they’re all getting crash courses in How To Talk About Science With The General Public, “we thought _you_ might be a better person to discuss the center’s research.”

 

Rey frowns. “But Professor Skywalker-”

 

“Has made it clear on multiple occasions that he prefers not to speak with reporters,” the woman says smoothly. Before Rey can even try to put up a protest she adds, “there are also the optics to consider.”

 

“The optics.”

 

The lady pats her hand. “Don’t worry, everyone’s going to love you.”

 

She doesn’t fully grasp the implications of that statement until Hux mutters something about token minorities and diversity bingo cards after Dean Holdo congratulates her on BB-8’s accidental internet popularity during a departmental meeting. For a moment she’s so shocked that she freezes in the middle of the hallway; she has to double back and speed walk to avoid raising her voice as she says, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

 

Hux barely looks over his shoulder at her. “It’s just a joke,” he drawls, long legs carrying him away fast enough that keeping up is a struggle. She’s seen him pull this power trip on grad students and lower-ranking faculty before, but it still rankles, anger warring with the fear of making a scene as their colleagues stream out of the conference room behind them, chattering obliviously.

 

“Mind explaining why it’s so funny?” she presses. One time - Rey just needs him to drop his oily veneer of plausible deniability one time.

 

Hux only smirks sharp-toothed at her though, too good at this game by now to get caught. “Keep up, Johnson,” he says lightly, “this is your fifteen minutes of fame.”

 

“He’s just jealous and bitter,” Finn huffs as they jog along the Embarcadero. It’s one of those rare days in San Francisco where the sky is a scrubbed-clean blue and the air feels so pure it pulls them along through streets heaving with traffic and twentysomething software engineers, AirPods dangling out their ears. “Getting mainstream media to care about your work is like every professor’s secret dream.”

 

“You don't think he has a point though?” Rey asks. “About it being because I - I check off certain boxes.”

 

Finn shrugs. Between the two of them, he’s always been the one approached to appear on diversity pamphlets and website homepages, and once, memorably, in the front row of the annual department picnic photo where they’d counted more Daniels than people of color on faculty. “Look,” he sighs, slowing down as they approach an intersection, “sometimes personal and professional stuff gets mixed up in academia. It’s all about donors and funding in the end.”

 

“I know that,” Rey grumbles. It’s why Luke avoids conferences like the plague and the Minority Scholars program on campus has difficulty with recruitment. If she ever gets an NSF CAREER award people like Hux will chalk it up to being female and first-generation until the day she dies. “I just don’t like it.”

 

“Well you can not like it and still list it on your CV,” Finn says. “There’s no prizes for making things harder on yourself.”

 

*

 

She ends up giving quotes to a couple digital news sites and Skyping into one podcast, which is weird enough because it means sorting actual work emails from bizarre hate mail mansplaining her own research to her for a couple days afterward. Rey’s typing out an intricate, multipart response to wrathofconner@gmail.com’s third attempt to bring up the falsification versus iterative validation debate when she suddenly comes to her senses and deletes the draft to go do something more productive with her life.

 

Tuesdays mean that the food court is serving potato-leek soup and lion’s head meatball subs; by the time she makes it down there the line has stretched to wrap around four cash registers and the lone depressing fruit stand that’s single-handedly keeping half the postdocs from developing scurvy. Rey grabs a spotty banana and accepts a smattering of congratulations alongside light ribbing from her colleagues as she waits to pay. Even Hux’s grad student Matt, who belongs to the unique subset of engineers that look like they should be pro athletes, mumbles shyly that he liked her NPR interview before melting away when Hux sweeps past clutching a bag of chips. Rey tries her best to wave off attention without resorting to false modesty and ends up saying about a billion times, “Yeah, but I’m glad that’s finally over.”

 

When she gets back to her office, there's a voicemail from the local CBS station asking if they can send a crew to AHCH-TO and film a segment for the 10 o'clock Friday spot.

 

DJ Cantonica is handsome like a rake, with the faded star power of a Disney teen heartthrob, a penchant for loud floral ties, and a stutter that’s just distinctive enough to make him the lead-in man for the channel’s weekend evening news coverage. He seems interested in absolutely everyone and everything despite also treating the world as a bit of joke, flirting shamelessly with Veronica and grinning at Luke’s ever-deepening scowl when he asks a series of questions that make a strong case for diverting NIH research funding toward better science education for the American public.

 

“So at this rate,” DJ says, rapping BB-8's head dome with two knuckles, “what's to stop my Roomba from hacking into my bank account and stealing my car?”

 

Veronica titters. Luke looks like someone just disproved the theory of evolution in front of him.

 

Rey’s re-calibrating BB-8’s optical scanner by hand when DJ finally saunters back up to her, hands shoved into his pockets and a smile that sets off seven kinds of alarm bells on his perfectly symmetrical face. It’s a smile that says he wants something from her, though what that could be is a mystery.

 

“You guys were great, really great. I think my producer’s really going to like this,” he confides as he rocks back on his heels and smiles at her - prolonged eye contact, implied intimacy. He’s good. Rey doesn’t miss the way he pitches his voice low enough that only the two of them can hear.

 

“Well we’re looking forward to seeing it on air,” she replies. “Was there anything else you needed?”

 

DJ makes a show of chewing on his lower lip. “Actually, just between you and me, off the record”, he says slowly, which is the first red flag; nothing good comes with a disclaimer that careful. “What’s the story with you and Ben Solo?”

 

Every hair on Rey’s body stands up in perfect synchronization. “There is no story,” she says automatically. BB-8 beeps and makes a quiet whirr. “I mean,” Rey says after a pause, “I don’t know what you’re talking about?”

 

“Yeah, right, sorry,” DJ says, shifting on his feet. “I get it. Gotta honor those non-disparagement clauses.” He manufactures some excuse about needing to go help the camera crew pack up before she can respond, but as soon as they’re gone, Rey locks herself in her office to text Ben:

 

_You need a better PR team._

 

Her phone starts buzzing near-instantly, as if there’s a high-speed fiber optic cable that connects directly to the part of his brain labeled OVERREACT: EVERYTHING. “Okay,” he says when she picks up, “I mean, I would disagree, but if there’s something in the news I should know about so I can fire the guy who runs our Twitter account-”

 

“What - no.”

 

“Oh.”

 

“I just.” She rubs her forehead. “Have you been telling people that we’re talking again?”

 

“Of course not. Why would I - shit, hold on.” Rey hears a colorful jumble of voices overlapping in the background, punctuated by the clink of very good crystal and the untz-untz-untz of a bass beat, before the noise cuts out. She can imagine the slump of Ben’s shoulders as he leans against the wall of whatever room he just retreated into. “Sorry, I’m at CES.”

 

“What’s that like?” Rey asks before she can stop herself. She looks out the window at the watery glass and steel facade of the biology labs next door, the cornflower blue sky beyond.

 

Ben makes a long-suffering noise. “Some guys just got 5 million in VC funding to privatize the concept of a bus stop. It’s fucking Juicero all over again. Food’s good at least.” He hesitates. “You’d like it, I think.”

 

“Oh yes,” Rey agrees, unable to keep the smile out of her voice. “I’m great with crowds of people who have cash to burn.”

 

“Or egos,” Ben says, and she thinks she hears an answering grin in response. “What’s this about, Rey?”

 

She hesitates. Rey’s never done the whole friends-with-exes thing before, but she’d always assumed that there would be more lingering resentment and fake niceness involved. Ben just sounds - open. A little concerned, but sincere. It makes her feel achingly young in a way she hasn’t been since grad school, when she’d known better than to ask for more than what was freely offered. Rey closes her eyes, reaching for the cool sense of detachment she’d clung to three years ago, when the other G2s wouldn’t shut up about a profile _MIT Technology Review_ did on Ben and how they should all stop resentfully obsessing over the job market to go work for Silicon Valley’s most brilliant CEO under 40. Rey had been in the death throes of thesis committee meetings then while still methodically stomping the shattered remains of her heart into dust; she never finished the article.

 

“I may have accidentally given DJ Cantonica from CBS News the impression that I signed a legal agreement not to slander your good name after we broke up,” she admits.

 

It sounds funny in hindsight - or it would, if Ben didn’t say, thunderous, “Excuse me?”

 

“He asked about, I don’t even know. Us. Off the record,” Rey clarifies, because that tone promises vengeance and while she hadn’t liked the guy, DJ did mention having five cats to support. “The channel’s doing a segment on AHCH-TO. I wasn’t expecting the question so I just...anyway, I think he got the wrong idea.”

 

“He thinks I put a _gag rule_ on you,” Ben says, sounding strangely hurt for a guy who once sued Valleywag because they published an unflattering photo of him eating at In-N-Out.

 

“What I want to know is why he’d ask that in the first place,” Rey points out. “It’s been what, five years now?”

 

A pause. “Give or take three months,” Ben says.

 

“Oh my god,” Rey says in horrified realization, “is this a normal thing? Do all of the women you date end up getting pestered about your personal life years afterward?”

 

“No. No they do not,” Ben grits out. After several seconds of embarrassed silence, he adds, “First Order employs several very well compensated lawyers and PR specialists.”

 

“Oh,” she says, although it figures he would have a fleet of people to deal with that sort of thing.

 

“Yeah.”

 

“I didn’t mean to imply that I thought I was a special case or something,” Rey says. It comes out wrong and she fumbles trying to make it lighter, a joke. “I’m sure you started dating the next pair of pretty eyes that came along.”

 

“I did no such thing,” Ben lies, which is kind of him.

 

“She also had great legs and an IQ of 250, then,” Rey teases.

 

Ben exhales sharply. “At least I’m not hitting on graduate students,” he snaps. It’s so out of the blue that for a moment she wonders if she missed part of the conversation. “You don’t get to accuse me of being shallow, not when you're chasing after the six foot blond in Hux’s lab. That guy looks like he crawled out the side of an Abercrombie bag from 2008 - seriously?”

 

Everything shifts, clicks. Rey sputters, “Wait - this is about _Matt?_ ”

 

“I don’t know!” Ben explodes. “Are there any other guys I should know about? Because, honestly, I’d rather hear it from you than Hux.”

 

Rey makes a mental note to finally book that appointment with the Title IX office and drag Finn along if it kills her. “Not that I owe either of you anything, but I have never and will never date a grad student,” she hisses into the phone. “Good to know what you and Hux both think about my sense of fucking professionalism though.”

 

“Oh, you really want to play that card?” Ben snarls, low and throttled-back and fucking dangerous; something primal in her shivers at the wounded animal fury behind his bitterness. “I'm not the one who came back from a week-long conference with my, my _uncle_ , and suddenly decided this relationship was over. What, did you finally get a taste of how it feels to hang off Luke Skywalker's arm and have everyone notice you?”

 

Rey goes into a rage blackout.

 

“You know what?” she says, anger burning a trail clean and bright through her system, leaving behind deadly calm. “Fuck you. This is over.”

 

“What,” Ben demands.

 

“Don’t talk to me again,” Rey warns, gripping her phone hard enough to bruise. “Don’t ever - fucking - try to -”

 

Something shatters in the background, or maybe that’s just her subconscious being dramatic. “Fine,” he says, mutinous.

 

“Fine.” Rey thinks back to that day in the bookstore - the golden, endothermic glow of feeling cared for, of being at the center of Ben’s absorbing, incalculable focus. She folds the sense-memory in half, then in half again, and finally one last time until it doesn’t burn when she breathes anymore, just throbs, raw and bone-deep, like the kind of wound that heals slowly, leaving a silvery knot of numb scar tissue in its wake. “And just to be clear,” she says before hanging up, “Matt’s way more ripped than you anyway.”

 

*

 

Shortly after, there’s a trickle of odd, unexpected occurrences: 16 people end up enrolling in her 5-person undergrad class on real-time systems; Hux stops openly antagonizing her during meetings; Veronica and James begin to date. It’s all very fast and exciting, though Rey has no idea how that last one happened - she suspects DJ’s blatant philandering may have given James the final push he needed to get his head out from between BB-8’s widgets. As the days grow incrementally longer, Rey spends a lot of time refining the scheduling algorithm with Luke and trying not to worry whenever she sees Veronica and James walking hand-in-hand around campus, fingers zippered together. Rotation students only stick around for a couple months anyway; there are more important things to focus on, like updating her tenure file or getting bullied into tea at the faculty club by Leia Organa, who is purportedly on campus to speak about election security at the Political Forum.

 

“First Order’s moving ahead with the final stage of VADER,” Leia relays between bites of a cucumber sandwich. Even with devastatingly chic sunglasses pushed up to her hairline and an immaculately tailored pantsuit, she looks tired. “Don’t take it personally. I appreciate everything you did reaching out to my son, but in hindsight it was never going to be that simple.”

 

Rey fiddles with her cloth napkin, still caught between nauseated relief at not having to explain her last conversation with Ben and guilt at the timing of the thing. She waits for Leia to go on, but the Senator just stirs more sugar into her tea. “Why did you ask me at all?” she finally ventures.

 

Leia runs a finger around the rim of her teacup. “Would you believe me if I said it was on a hunch?”

 

“No,” Rey admits.

 

A pause. “I met Han at the academy. My husband,” Leia says abruptly. “He was Air Force too.” Her expression grows fond as Rey tries to imagine a man with Ben’s nose, Ben’s height - surely he didn’t get his dinosaur-like wingspan from his mother. “I used to think he was trying to undermine my authority, but it turns out he's just shameless and an abysmal flirt. There were fifteen objections at our wedding, the majority of them from Luke and my father.”

 

“Ah.”

 

“But I went through with it anyway, because I had a feeling about him. You can tell when a man really cares about a woman, even when 90% of the time they want to set each other’s hair on fire.” She winks. “He pays attention.”

 

Rey wants to say: you’ve got the wrong idea. She wants to say: if Leia is right, then the last few weeks are proof positive that Ben Solo doesn’t pay attention to her at all, that she’d spent 18 months dating a man who thought she was a cheater and slept her way to the top. For as long as she’s known him, Ben has always been the smartest guy in the room, someone who grew up wrapped in layers and layers of privilege, who likes expensive pens and classic science fiction and has a laugh like her favorite secret. It seems absurd that he could run the most cutting-edge big data company in the world yet misread her so deeply, but then again, hadn’t she made the same mistake? Thinking five years would provide enough distance to set things right when they'd both kept secrets sharp enough to bruise, when she’s only now realizing that perhaps all she’ll ever know of Ben Solo is the pared-down, frictionless surface of him, untouchable and locked under four-factor authentication, an approximation that never converges.

 

Then Leia says, “Are you all right, dear?” and Rey startles back into the present with a guilty jerk.

 

“It’s nothing, it’s nothing,” she says when Leia raises one threaded eyebrow. “Sorry - I was somewhere else for a minute.”

 

“Not too far, I hope.”

 

“Not at all,” Rey lies.

 

“Hm.” Leia, mercifully, limits her pointed look of indulgent skepticism to three seconds before gracefully changing the subject to other matters and giving Rey time to collect herself: the weather, the latest government shutdown, an amazing baklava place she just discovered in San Jose, that time Luke almost got kicked out of his PhD program for starting two lab fires in one semester.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you enjoyed reading and as always, please let me know what you enjoyed/didn't enjoy/general concrit!


	7. Chapter 7

A month after Snoke’s death - six months before they broke up - Rey and Ben went to Takodana for a _Tron-_ themed game night. Two rounds into their match at the pinball machine, some brogrammer in a facebook shirt had said breathily, “Oh my god, is that Ben Solo?” and sent the whole bar spiraling into chaos. They’d ended up leaving with drinks half-finished, Ben’s hand resting proprietary at the small of her back as he ushered her out a side exit. “Sorry, that might happen a lot now,” he said quickly.

 

It turned out that dating Ben, reluctant morning person and director of engineering at First Order Technologies, was a vastly different experience from dating _Benjamin Solo, CEO._ Overnight his net worth climbed from the 1 to the 0.000001 percent, a continental shift that felt abstract and unreal outside the few key additions to their day-to-day lives: the airy condo in Pacific Heights, the sleek new sports car, the private company jet with aerodynamic curves that sent Rey into conniptions.

 

“This is honestly making me feel kind of insecure,” Ben had shouted from his spot on the tarmac as she ran around the plane, reverent hands itching to map its wingspan and dual Rolls-Royce engines.

 

“It’s a Citation X,” Rey moaned. “Ben, do you know how much one of these costs?”

 

“23.4 million, last time I checked.” Footsteps shuffled behind her before a warm arm draped itself around her shoulders. “Want to go for a ride? You can be my co-pilot,” he murmured.

 

Rey twisted around. “Seriously? Since when have you known how fly?”

 

“Since I was practically in diapers. My father taught me.” Ben’s face contorted in an odd mixture of pride and resentment before his gaze dropped to her mouth, distracted. He had a way of looking at her that was studious, incisive: in turn, she’d discovered his weakness for gentle handling. They nearly broke the sound barrier before landing back on solid earth, and Rey rode Ben in the cockpit slowly, knees jammed between leather seats and throttle levers as she panted, “Thank you, that was incredible, I don't know how to ever top that for you” while he’d bucked and moaned and gasped beneath her, whispering back, “You already have.” The bruises took ages to fade but she’d pressed on them for days afterward anyway. It was a good hurt, and besides, this was special: she’d mentioned once that she did a college internship at Boeing, that she wanted to be an astronaut growing up, drawing rocket ships before she knew how to spell her own name - and he’d listened.

 

They filled those early weeks with rushed breakfasts and exhausted, mismatched sleeping schedules. Then Ben flew out to New York to oversee talks about building First Order’s second headquarters, kissing Rey back hot enough to sear as she’d handed over his carry-on at the gate. _Don’t forget about - don’t forget to call_ , she’d joked uneasily. And he hadn’t, at least not for a while.

 

Then Hosnian Systems beat out First Order for the NSA contract and Rey’s thesis proposal got sent back with an ominous stamp saying ‘needs further consultation’.

 

Ben made it clear that he didn’t want to talk about work. Rey couldn’t understand why, not when she was going through the five stages of grief over the low-key implosion of her own research project: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, Haagen-Dazs. He coped by replacing half of First Order’s R&D division and staying until 4am at the office shouting at people; she buried her feelings instead, grit her teeth through endless meetings with Luke and Dean Holdo to address the committee’s concerns that BB-8 was “unrealistic” and “frankly, an irresponsible use of funding”.

 

With the benefit of hindsight Rey now knows that grad school is at least 85% failure and self-doubt and slogging through nights where you sit in your underwear on your bed drinking Diet Coke as the world spins out of control because results were not reproducible and your advisor is probably going to drop you. The highs are very high but the lows can be devastatingly, soul-crushingly low. She’d needed someone there to stroke her hair, to listen and reassure her through the quiet panic attacks because if everyone else getting their PhD could do it, why couldn’t she? - but at the time it seemed like the worst sort of selfishness to ask that of Ben, who came back every night stooped under the Sisyphean weight of his own worries and hurt pride, when he came back at all. So Rey, who’d grown up with far worse and more negligent kinds of love, had told herself that this too would pass in time, resolving to be patient.

 

Here’s the thing though: without hard evidence, without action, without elegant, irrefutable proof, Rey has a difficult time believing in certain things. Scientology, for example, or or love, the big forever Hollywood kind. Maybe she’s needier than she wants to admit. Maybe it’s the foster kid surfacing like a green-eyed swamp monster years on, demanding a constant, exhausting stream of validation to feel secure. Maybe Godel proved the fundamental unknowability of the universe, but that doesn’t mean that Rey can’t double- or triple-check on her own, always skeptical of a good thing, building contingency plans for contingency plans.

 

“Can we leave soon?” she’d asked Ben at one of the many work events they attended - a launch party for some hot new startup backed by First Order, she wasn’t sure anymore. “I need to be up early tomorrow to meet with Luke.”

 

He had smiled down at her, distracted and faintly annoyed. “Is he still being difficult? I already said you could just come work for me if it gets too hard.”

 

“That’s not it,” Rey had said. Forcing the glare off her face as a photographer swept by, she added in a strained voice, “Ben, I don’t know any of these people.”

 

“I know, sweetheart, I’m sorry,” he said, knitting her close and massaging fingers into the tense space between her shoulders, safe and familiar. She swayed into his side instinctively, helped along by the fact that her feet were aching points in their mile-high pumps. “But it’s the board’s orders. Once I have more control over the company, we can stay in as much as you like.”

 

Rey checked her wristwatch. It was pretty, delicate-looking but durable enough to withstand constantly getting knocked into tables or scratched by power tools. Ben had gifted it to her to celebrate finally moving in together and she wore it every day, not that he seemed to notice that sort of thing anymore. The backless evening gown tonight, the Tiffany necklace that dripped emeralds down over her collarbones - those had been presents from him too, but they felt more impersonal, couriered over to AHCH-TO by his distractingly gorgeous PA Bazine who rolled her eyes when Rey asked if there anything else, maybe a note from Ben, drawling: No, that’s all, Mr. Solo will send a car for you at 8pm tonight.

 

“One more hour?” she asked hopefully.

 

“Just one,” Ben assured her. They stayed until dawn crept shy and pink over the horizon, and Rey stumbled through the rest of the week with a low-grade headache to chase the shot of existential dread she took every morning whenever Luke sent another vague but distressing email reply of _We will discuss this in lab meeting later._

 

“Not that it matters to me or anything, but are you okay?” Luke said as they cut out large swathes of her thesis proposal with the judgement of an angry god.

 

“You mean besides the fact that my research is extremely behind schedule, I might have to take another year if this new proposal doesn’t get approved, and there are ants in the break room?” Rey asked.

 

Luke rolled his eyes, annoyingly immune to all forms of pettiness not his own. “Yeah, besides that.”

 

“Then I’m doing amazing,” she said, deleting a footnote with more force than perhaps was strictly necessary.

 

They worked in silence for another five minutes before Luke said, “You know, if there’s anything going on with- if there’s anything going on in your personal life, you can take a few days off to regroup. I’ll talk to the committee for you. It’ll be fine.”

 

Unbidden, tears welled up behind her eyes. Rey blinked furiously at the computer screen to hold them back. “Sure.”

 

“Okay then,” Luke sighed. He turned away awkwardly to check his phone, muttering something about trouble in paradise and feelings contaminating his labspace.

 

It had just been a while, Rey told herself. It had been a few weeks since Ben initiated sex or asked about her day first. She wasn’t keeping track, per se, but she was noticing a trend. Subtle. Difficult to bring up without looking desperate. Rey was pretty sure she and Ben were going through - not an official rough patch, but more the low-grade simmer between two people who’ve been together long enough that all the occasional irritations arising from significant, long term, fundamental issues seem more tolerable. The crack in the dam. The hole in the bottom of the boat. Minor stuff that only became a big deal once you both started noticing the knee-deep water rising around you.

 

Still, she hoped. Hope rose up like the stubborn flame on a birthday cake, fragile and longing and ardent, when she handed over his keys in the morning and he dropped a kiss to her forehead, running a thumb over the shell of her ear. Part of Rey hoped that the resentment was a temporary thing. Maybe it wasn’t real. If it wasn’t real, then they weren’t fighting about what she suspected they were really fighting about. Ben wasn’t going to leave her. She wasn’t going to have to leave him. One day, after First Order and her thesis were dealt with, they would come back to how they were, as better people. He’d apologize for being distant and secretive. She’d learn to forgive and be more trusting. And everything would be fine.

 

*

In a feat that will go down as one of the top 5 best moments of Rey’s life, the RSS robotics conference accepts their job shop scheduling paper in April. Luke takes the lab out for a celebratory dinner at an Israeli restaurant near lab. While their bright-eyed new undergrad RAs and slightly-more-careworn Masters candidates are gorging themselves on freshly made hummus and lamb and pomegranate, he leans over in the booth and whispers, “Congratulations, Dean Holdo’s recommending that you go up for tenure next year.”

 

It’s awesome for reasons beyond imagining Hux’s head exploding from jealousy when he finds out. “How do you feel?” Finn asks that evening as they’re polishing off a handle of Jack Daniels Tennessee Honey on the roof of his apartment. Rey scrubs a sleeve over her mouth and shrugs helplessly.

 

“Like I could literally punch a dragon out of the air and do a backflip over the Grand Canyon and fight off an entire army of ninjas,” she admits.

 

Finn laughs. “Okay, yeah, I think you’ve reached your optimal buzz,” he says before plucking the bottle away from her. Rey giggles, kicking out a leg towards the hyperbright sprawl of the city beyond, rivers of light swimming in the darkness like some strange new constellation. Her body is a golden bubble made of photons and glass and she sends a momentary silent prayer of thanks up - to God, to red strings of fate, to peptide bonds, the ozone layer, whatever, whoever, rules their lives - for moments like these.

 

She’s decidedly less grateful the next morning after waking up in the guest bedroom of the Storm-Tico household with a splitting headache and a sinking sense of deja vu.

 

“I think I’m dead,” she informs Finn and Rose after stumbling into the living room, where they’re eating cereal and watching reruns from that Biblical demon hunting TV show that’s been on air forever and will probably outlive them all. Rey feels a lot of empathy for the girl on screen getting buried alive right now.

 

“Reader 1 is not convinced of the author’s claim,” Finn says, grinning, because Finn is both a saint and a smug little shit sometimes. “To prove the validity of her findings, she should repeat her experiment with a greater sample size of whiskey sours.”

 

Rose nods. “Reader 2 finds that the author failed to explain the technical definition of ‘dead’ in sufficient detail, and would like to request more clarity regarding how it affects her ability to help with dishes.”

 

Rey squints at them both. “Are you guys serious? Have you been waiting all morning to do this bit?”

 

Finn slides her a plate of toast and some orange juice. “We regret to inform you that being being a buzzkill does not meet what our reviewers are looking to see in _Nature_ at this time,” he says, solemn. “We recommend submission to a different journal.”

 

Rey rips into a slightly tough slice of whole wheat and guzzles down the glass of juice, tart sweetness exploding over the parched desert of her throat. “Ha ha,” she says, “but I actually need to start scouting references for my application packet.”

 

“Ask Calrissian,” Rose shouts after her as Rey tugs on her shoes by the door and waves goodbye. “He’ll recommend anyone who listens to him talk about poker long enough.”

 

Given what’s happened the last few times she drank to excess, she’s half expecting to learn that she prank called Dean Holdo or agreed to teach another undergrad seminar last night. Thankfully, no one mentions anything come Monday beyond Hux, who sends her a hilariously resentful congratulations email that Rey prints out and magnetizes to a white board for posterity. She meets with AHCH-TO’s lab manager to discuss travel reimbursements for the RSS conference, swings by a job talk where she only understands about 40% of what’s being said while stealthily eating two free burritos, and finally attends a committee meeting where they discuss how to implement proper project management training for PhD students and new faculty.

 

“What’s up with your face?” Jessika asks after they’ve concluded a heated debate over whether budgeting and hiring practices should take precedence over managing data and file structures. Rey’s never been privy to Ventress and Grievous’ legendary, window-smashing feuds over department administration before, but she’s pretty sure the shouting cracked several panes of glass.  

 

“What do you mean?” Rey says.

 

Jess points. “That. The smile. You look like a photo of a Stockholm victim.”

 

“It’s the tenure,” Bodhi Rook says distractedly as he shuffles by them clutching a coffee mug the circumference of Rey’s thigh. “Congrats, Johnson, by the way. Just wait until you get to change your email sign-off to ‘Associate Prof’. _Nirvana_.”

 

Rey touches her face. “This is how I normally look. And thanks, but I still have to apply. The university can always deny me, it’s not like-”

 

“They’re not going to deny your application,” Jessika says, rolling her eyes. “They’re afraid that if they wait any longer, another university’s going to poach you and then Skywalker will retire in two years and they’ll be stuck promoting Sol Rivas or someone equally mediocre.”

 

She yawns and stretches as they leave Kenobi Hall and step out onto the wide marble steps thronging with students just returned from spring break, sun-kissed and languorously happy. The quad is a lush green tinkling with bicycle bells and burbling fountains and for a moment Rey’s transported: she’s 24 again, she’s at an R1 institution, she’s caught in the first flush of love. Part of Rey wishes she could go back to that time and tell her younger self _be more careful_ , but the larger part, the better part, is 30 now and finally comfortable in her own skin. And maybe that would’ve happened anyway without Ben and all the smashed up broken glass possibilities between them - but she can’t find it in herself to be anything but grateful, ultimately, for him and all the ways he’s reshaped the fundamental algorithms of her, for whatever force in the universe hurled them improbably into each other’s lives, left an indelible mark on the cartography of her slow-beating, still-bruised heart.

 

“You know,” she says to Jessika, which of course is the exact moment her cell phone starts buzzing like a hive of kicked hornets. By the time she answers the latest incoming call from Luke, there are push notifications flooding her lockscreen as well, every one of them breaking the same news story. Ben Solo’s been in a car crash.

 

*

 

It’s sort of silly, but they broke up over a ride. Honestly, between Ben lying and Rey ceasing to give a shit and them both picking nasty, loud fights that inevitably ended in fraught sex or Ben storming off to sleep at the office, she’d known for a while that the end was coming - only when Rey had imagined it, she’d pictured lurid tabloid headlines about Bazine or some bendy intern. The reality was more mundane: she had asked Ben to pick her up at the airport after the AAAI conference, and he’d forgotten.

 

That part came as no great surprise. The diamond dust and increasingly exclusive social ledgers they appeared in couldn’t cover up a yawning void at the core. Ben was obsessed with work; even at home, his mind was always 30 miles away, flying back to First Order’s beautiful campus in the valley while Rey picked at dinner in silence. Lately she’d made a game of it, prattling on about random topics to see which he’d react to - traffic, reality TV, the dying of the bees, Luke, it was always Luke. Whenever she stayed late at lab or had to miss a First Order work event, Ben wanted to know why, mouth flattening at the mention of his uncle or her thesis deadlines. When she’d flipped the inquisition around, pointing out all the times he dropped off the face of the earth with zero warning, he dismissed her questions by muttering about new contracts and hardass government liaisons.

 

Rey wasn’t stupid. The human brain is an incredibly powerful pattern matcher, and in any case, they were both terrible actors; after being in love for so long, you couldn’t fake the signs once it faded.

 

Still, she’d asked “You remember, right?”, hefting a backpack while he carried her suitcase to the car taking her to SFO.

 

“Of course,” Ben said. “5:30 on Thursday, you’re back.”

 

Rey had nodded, ducking into the backseat of the black McLaren 650s rumbling by the curb. And Ben had looked up from his phone screen briefly to give the driver instructions before he stooped down, one arm braced against the roof of the car, searching her face with an oddly intimate expression akin to a high-powered microscope.

 

“What?” Rey had said, slightly defensive. “What?”

 

“Nothing,” Ben said after a moment. He tucked the keys dangling out of her coat pocket inside more securely. “Just - good luck. Travel safe.” He looked a little embarrassed, like the time she'd squeezed his hand absentmindedly during a dinner with Peter Thiel.

 

When Rey’s feeling especially masochistic, she reminds herself that he’d also been good to her, kinder than she’d often deserved.

 

AAAI went about as well as could reasonably be expected, which meant no one from the lab cried in public and Luke answered 3 audience questions after his research talk before disappearing. She caught him a couple hours later, trying to shove his crystal Feigenbaum award down a trash chute.

 

They landed back at SFO disheveled, sleep deprived, and slightly sunburned. Rey sketched a wave goodbye to Luke at the baggage carousel before peeling off with Finn to find Ben and Rose, the latter of whom was waiting at Terminal B already.

 

“Sure you don’t want a ride?” Rose asked after she’d tackled Finn with kisses and a tube of aloe vera. Happiness wafted off them like secondhand smoke, closing around Rey’s chest like a vise as she checked the time again. Ben was nowhere to be seen.

 

“I’m okay. You guys go on ahead.”

 

Finn had coughed. “Traffic’s probably awful right now anyhow,” he’d pointed out, exchanging glances with Rose, who started nodding with all the subtlety of a hole in the head.

 

“We could get something to eat and chill for a bit,” she suggested. “Chili cheese fries.”

 

Rey looked down at her shoes, then back up at Finn, who watched her steadily. “Maybe Ben’s at the wrong terminal,” he said.

 

That had made her laugh. “Rose figured it out easy enough.”

 

And eventually Finn - because he’s still the same boy from all those years ago, the one with the steady hands and good heart who convinced her she was destined for better things than bot maintenance at the local shipping factory - had nodded in resigned understanding, tugging away a confused and concerned-looking Rose as he said, “All right then, call us if you need anything.”  

 

Rey waited at SFO for four hours while cars pulled up and drove off with other people, slowly gaining a clearer perspective on the low-budget CW melodrama that had become her life lately. In her mind’s eye, she suddenly saw herself refracted through time and space, stereoscopic images falling out of alignment to reveal a woman with one suitcase and half a PhD, watching a little girl scream at Plutt for saying her parents were gone. Rey’s never moved on, though she thought she had, never let go, though she’d tried, never done anything except stand at the end of the empty driveway.

 

“You can’t go in there,” Bazine had said automatically when Rey showed up at First Order headquarters, still dragging her suitcase and trembling from rage accumulated on the 45-minute Uber ride over.

 

“Don’t worry,” Rey had snarled, past caring about the twenty pairs of eyes staring at her back as she crossed the open-plan floor, making a beeline towards the bank of frosted glass walls that demarcated Ben’s office. “This won’t take long at all.”

 

Bazine had made a high noise of distress as she trailed behind. “Mr. Solo’s on an important call right now-” she protested, and distantly Rey wondered what had made his eye wander first: the work, or the black latex thigh-highs.

 

Ben’s head snapped up as Rey stormed inside. “Bazine, I swear to god,” he hissed, stabbing the mute button on the Polycom Soundstation on his desk and looking up, “what the fuck did I say -” The irritation in his voice guttered out when he saw her, face abruptly flipping through a comical slideshow of emotions: surprise, confusion, recollection, horror, guilt. “Shit, Rey.”

 

She threw her keys at him.

 

They skidded off the surface of his desk with a harmless clink, disappearing into the thick pile carpet. And suddenly it was like the towering, boiling-over volcano under Rey’s skin whimpered out; she was left feeling mean and overlooked and desperately insignificant standing there inside the sleek black oasis of his office while his rubbernecking employees probably plastered themselves to the opposite side of the opaque glass.

 

“I don’t think we should see each other anymore,” she said.

 

Ben, who had bent down to pick up the keys, suddenly rocked backwards, blinking up at her like he didn’t understand. “I don’t understand.”

 

Rey still had one hand curled around the doorknob. No point in drawing this out; he had a meeting to rejoin, after all. “It’s just -” She took a deep breath, trying to recall the words she’d practiced on the elevator ride up. “Clearly we have irreconcilable differences,” she said lamely.

 

“What.” Ben’s mouth opened and closed several times, like he was trying to wring the words from thin air. “Rey, I swear, I am so sorry. I lost track of time. Let me -”

 

“Don't, please. You should get back to whoever you're calling, by the way, it sounded like they were discussing something important.” Ben twitched guiltily and she soldiered on, each word physically peeling it way out of her chest. “Don’t you think we should both stop pretending?” Rey had asked, trying for a desperate smile, skirting the edges of dignity.

 

Ben swallowed. “You’ve had a stressful day. I, I fully acknowledge what I had to do with it, but we should talk after-”

 

Something fragile in Rey snapped, a clean break. “ _That’s not the point,_ ” she’d suddenly roared. “It’s not too hard, Ben, it’s just not fucking worth it anymore!”

 

And well, there was nothing he could say to that. Ben had blinked, then looked hard at the keys dangling from his fingers, then, after an absurdly long pause, finally asked - “Where are you going to stay?”

 

Frowning, Rey shook her head at the bewilderment in his voice and jerked open the door to his office again, edging her way out. Several heads conspicuously swiveled away to focus on their computer monitors. Sometime in the last five minutes Bazine had called security, and Rey couldn’t help rolling her eyes at the sheepish-looking guards as she held up one hand in surrender and backed away towards the elevators. Everything seemed to unfold from a great distance. Twelve months of dating, of Ben awakening emotions inside her that had lain dormant for 2 decades, of being as close as she'd ever been to anyone, followed by six months of dwindling contact that had dried up to a bitter trickle - this was how it ended: in a blowout fight in front of half the top brass at First Order, secrets still burning up air between them.

 

On a whim, she had glanced back once before stepping into the elevator. The moment spooled out: all the frozen shellshocked details of Ben’s face, disappearing behind the half-closed door, were so clear that for the first time in months it felt like the distance between them didn’t exist and holy fucking shit Rey needed to get out of there.

 

Afterward, there had been a series of memorable/terrible one-sided fights, which finally ended with campus security being called and one of Ben’s male PAs sending her a brief, bloodlessly polite email letting Rey know when she could stop by the condo to pick up the rest of her stuff uninterrupted. She’d gone early one morning after First Order Technology’s hostile takeover of Hosnian Systems was announced to the public, and it had been surreal, shoving clean underwear into a duffel bag surrounded by the collective detritus of their intertwined lives: clothes, jewelry, CDs, pictures, Tupperware bowls missing half of their lids. She’d let Ben keep most of it, setting her watch on top of the dresser next to a stack of unread Iain Banks novels and a Macy’s sweater she’d bought for him once during a deep learning bootcamp at NYU, on the errant thought that it matched his eyes. Sometimes she wonders if that had been the cruelest stroke - not taking everything, but leaving so much of it behind.

 

At the end of the day though, Rey figures the moral calculus of who fucked up more is irrelevant. There’s confounding factors of family and upbringing and nature vs nurture that they could sift through all day with an expensive therapist, but ultimately the situation came down to one salient fact: Rey had been afraid. Not _of_ Ben, because even at his worst she’s always felt safe with him, in a messed up sort of way. She doesn’t fault him for his ambition, nor does she begrudge him his success - but she hadn’t known how to fit into the grand scheme of his empire building anymore, doubtful whether there was still a place for her by his side rather than in his shadow.

 

She could not, would not, beg for anyone else to stay. And in the end, Ben had made his choices too, moved on to loftier passions and more interesting puzzles, and Rey had let him go.


	8. Chapter 8

“He hit the center divide on I-280 about an hour ago,” Luke says.

 

“Okay,” Rey says. That doesn’t sound too bad. “Is he hurt?”

 

“Officially, it’s just a clip. He’s at SF General for a minor concussion and some bruising right now.”

 

Officially. “So why’s it on every news channel?”

 

“Well,” Luke says diplomatically, “people have phones.”

 

Rey watches a grainy 20-second video of the incident on Youtube, and for a moment she has to remind herself the technical process for breathing. “Bullshit that’s a clip,” she says.

 

She grew up fixing broken headlights and scratched paint, but Ben’s car is in the kind of condition that gets towed straight to the impound plot. There’s a sickening accordion crunch that ripples out from the point of impact where the right corner of the hood has lodged itself into the sound wall.  She pauses at the part where the car - a custom-built black Koenigsegg with curves for days - starts to smoke.

 

“Seriously, how did that even happen?” Rey squeezes her eyes shut, clenches her fists. “Is he really okay?”

 

“He’ll be fine,” Luke says, gruff. “Leia didn’t sound too worried.”

 

Something about that plucks her the wrong way, like the grind of two mismatched puzzle pieces being forced together. “He’s your nephew,” Rey says in a voice that comes out more sharp and accusatory than she’d planned for. “Are you going to visit him at all?”

 

“I’m tied up with the symposium this week,” says Luke. He pauses. “If you want to send flowers though, be my guest. I'll split the cost.”

 

Rey hangs up, more shocked than anything that there’s someone who has a more complicated relationship with Ben Solo than herself. The realization lingers throughout the rest of the day, eating up the thread of her attention until she lets out an inarticulate groan of defeat that BB-8 echoes with an anxious whirr.

 

It’s strange, feeling angry on Ben’s account. She’s not involved anymore - god knows every time Rey thinks about their last conversation her blood boils over - yet she can’t help but wonder: how’s he going to eat? Sleep? Go to the bathroom? Who’s taking care of him? Objectively Rey knows that there’s a host of professionals paid to look after Ben. Bazine with her BlackBerry and kitten heels. Yet she feels unaccountably sick at the thought of him coming back to that condo alone, without anyone to stop him from eating a whole sleeve of Pringles or watching _Doctor Who_ until he gives himself another concussion.

 

She wonders if that's a bug or a feature of any Rey in any universe - wanting Ben to be okay.

 

In the end, she compromises. A few days later Rey drives to the Korean place in El Camino where they sell oxtail soup that used to make Ben go cross-eyed from bliss, leaving it with his doorman Mitaka, who’s understandably awkward about the whole thing.

 

“Just tell him that it’s from - it’s from Ender Wiggin,” Rey says, holding out the brown paper bag.

 

“Ma’am,” Mitaka says feebly.

 

Rey sighs and pushes the soup forward, insistent. “Please.”

 

She’s rummaging through the black hole of her bag for car keys, squinting under the orange sodium lamp glow of the parking garage, when Ben calls.

 

“Don’t move,” he demands, sounding frantic and out of breath. “Stay _right where you are._ ”

 

Rey opens her mouth to tell him where exactly he can take that attitude, but before she gets a word in edgewise someone’s crowding her up against the cold metal of the driver’s side.

 

Ben looms over her, pupils blown open. One of his hands clutches the brown paper bag with the soup while the other curls loosely around his phone. Rey stares and stares up at the shadowed lines of his face, and it's like stepping into a fond memory, one she hasn't visited in a while.

 

Then the lights buzz overhead and the years clap together. Rey gulps, looking away at the ground.

 

“That was fast,” she says.

 

“I got your message,” says Ben. His voice is soft, excruciatingly controlled, like he can’t believe this is happening. “What are you doing here?”

 

Rey is intimately familiar with the landscape of Ben’s emotions: the sharp edge of his anger; the jagged, vicious black streak of his jealousy; his lopsided, luminous smiles. Right now he’s staring down at her like she’s his very own personal Clark Kent, and Rey hates how that makes the air turn electric, a hot pulse of guilty excitement fluttering down the length of her spine.

 

“Your family wanted to make sure you were okay,” she half-lies. “Luke couldn’t visit right away, so I-”

 

“You brought me soup,” he interrupts, stepping closer as a wondering grin expands across his face. “Seriously, ‘Ender Wiggin’?”

 

Rey backs up a little. “Thought it would get your attention.”

 

Ben’s eyes turn molten at that, radiating heat like there’s a dying star behind the carefully constructed mask he’s wearing. “Come back up with me,” he says all of a sudden.

 

Rey blinks. Right. Car crash. Concussion. “Sure,” she agrees, “you probably shouldn’t be walking around by yourself right now.”

 

“That’s not it,” Ben says, kind of intensely for someone who’s supposed to be suffering symptoms of dizziness and confusion. He swallows, shakes his head. “There’s something you need to see.”

*

 

The elevator ride up to Ben's apartment is definitely charged with _something_ , though Rey can't place her finger on it until the door closes. She’s half-expecting him to throw her up against a wall and savage her mouth, but instead he turns shy, ducking off to the kitchen area with the soup while she lingers by the grey sectional couch, hands clasped awkwardly behind her back.

 

The space doesn’t look all that different from when she left it five years ago. Still decorated in cool tones and tasteful black accents, because after half an hour of the interior designer making them choose between identical fabric swatches, Ben had all but pointed at a random picture in the book and said, “Just make it like this, please.” Rey brushes past a new coffee table, remembering how she’d come to like the cheerful blue stripe that ran around the edge of the ceiling. Little details hiccup to the surface of memory: the gauzy flutter of the south-facing curtains, that scratch in the floorboards whose origins they could never agree on, how the burnt smell of toast hugged everything when she tumbled out of bed one Sunday morning to find Ben back from a red-eye flight out of London, creased and wonderful-looking. Everywhere Rey turns brims overfull with watery echoes that flood straight into her lungs, make her chest go tight, setting off a panicked fight-or-flight response that tilts more towards the latter the longer she stays here.

 

As if he can tell she’s ready to bolt, Ben suddenly reappears holding two bottles of water.

 

“Here,” he says, extending one out to her.

 

“Thank you,” Rey says politely. She twists off the cap with a satisfying pop and takes a long pull, mildly surprised at the mineral taste. When she checks the sleek, sophisticated-looking label, it’s written entirely in Japanese. Ben’s never come off as the type to go for that particular brand of Silicon Valley excess, but before she can give him shit about starting a goop cleanse or immortality diet next, she takes in the damage up close.

 

He looks terrible. Even with the lights dimmed like early dusk, he’s clearly the walking wounded - purple smudges beneath bloodshot eyes and exhaustion written across his long face in bold highlighter. Rey wants to put her hands on Ben and inspect further, suddenly scared there’s worse hiding underneath the sweats and ratty MIT hoodie, but that feels presumptuous somehow.

 

Instead she waits for him to croak out, “Sorry, I just need a minute to process that you’re really here.”

 

It hurts like the wrench of a phantom limb - dull yet surprisingly painful. “Well, now I am,” she says.

 

“Now you are.”

 

Rey opens her mouth to ask about whatever mysterious business he’s called her up here for, but before she can Ben adds, “I’m sorry for what I said last time.”

 

“Oh,” Rey says, confused for a second before she remembers to be monumentally angry about that again. “Yeah.”

 

“I don’t actually think you would sleep with - you know. That was out of line.”

 

“Huh.” She crosses her arms. “You can’t even say it.”

 

Ben scowls. “Excuse me for not wanting to imagine you and Luke in the same zip code, much less like _that_.”

 

Rey throws up her hands. “You wouldn’t have to if you actually trusted me. I trusted _you_ , I always -” Her voice stumbles, falters, peters out, because that hadn’t been all true, had it? Not at the end. Ben must realize it at the same time she does because his expression cracks open like dropped eggshell, something crumpling inward before he turns away sharply, fists clenched.

 

“- I can’t believe I’m arguing with a concussed person,” Rey swerves. “Shouldn’t you have a nurse or someone around here?”

 

“It’s a security hazard.”

 

“Someone making sure you don’t fall or end up in the hospital again is a security hazard?”

 

“What’s it to you?” Ben shoots back. He sounds so shitty and irritable about it that Rey can’t help but laugh.

 

“I’m not the one driving into walls at 3:30 in the afternoon. You clearly need help, or your PR team is going to run out of plausible excuses like sleep deprivation and a bad reaction to vertigo meds.”

 

“I’ll fire them all,” says Ben darkly, but at least he’s meeting her eyes again.

 

There’s always been a piercing quality to Ben’s stare. He used to sometimes give her these quiet little looks that made her start talking, and keep talking, word-vomiting past safe topics like work and hobbies to deeply embarrassing shit like how Rey still can’t eat at Applebees, because it’s the last meal her parents bought her before skipping town on a “business trip” like the world’s biggest god damn Lifetime cliche.  Not the worst restaurant chain to be ruined for, but still. It had been nice - for a while - not needing to compress herself into more easily manageable pieces around someone.

 

“So,” Rey says, clearing her throat, “that thing I have to see.”

 

The easiness between them pops like a bubble, Ben blinking the film out of his eyes.

 

“Right,” he says after a strange, loaded pause. “Follow me.”

 

Pivoting away jerkily, Ben starts toward the hall that leads to the home study. Rey stares after him a moment, but he doesn’t look back to check if she follows. Maybe leaving both of them an out. Then again, this isn’t five years ago, and Rey isn’t a coward anymore; whatever they were to each other, whatever they are now, one more revelation can’t possibly change things - and besides, Rey thinks as she trails after him, if there’s one thing she’s never been been able to resist chasing her whole life, it’s a good answer.

 

*

 

Rey’s feelings about surveillance technology are cautious verging on skeptical. On one hand, there’s the cracking of the London subway and Boston marathon bombing cases, the satellite imagery showing refugees encampments and irrefutable proof of global climate change. On the other hand, the worldwide metastasis of cameras and internet access effectively makes all the world one giant, unsuspecting stage. Smartphones already vacuum up and transmit billions of instantaneous data points on people’s locations, conversations, transactions, and social relationships. Cross-industry efforts have built massive object banks that ever-more-sophisticated image recognition software can be trained on. Surveillance creep is an especially troubling phenomenon because it mixes two things notorious for their ethical laxity: whip-smart young CS nerds and the government.

 

She’s not a deep learning expert by trade; Rey spent her undergrad working on haptics in Mashra Aqualish’s lab, prototyping tactile devices with voice coil actuators and DC servo motors, building real-time control systems for haptic feedback in the industrial setting. She learned Python and Julia by the seat of her pants and whiled away a good chunk of her PhD teaching BB8 to distinguish between people versus not-people when moving around a crowded room. If anything about the Internet of Eyes and Ears disturbs Rey, it’s the misplaced confidence that computers will somehow eliminate all the boring normal human biases and guesswork of daily life, rather than amplify them under a slick veneer of certainty. And while AHCH-TO’s research could one day theoretically feed into intelligent surveillance systems, on the whole Rey subscribes to Luke’s view of machine learning as mostly statistics tarted up in a gold frame and pimped out in front of people who don’t know any better.

 

Mostly.

 

VADER, Rey thinks, rueful, is Ben Solo and the First Order.

 

It’s just a snippet of a section of an algorithm that he shows her, the barest sketch of a model that Rey can nevertheless feel the correctness of down to her bones as she scrolls through the tablet’s code. Elegant, obvious in hindsight, like the last missing piece in a puzzle of a clear blue sky.

 

“It was supposed to be an intractable problem within VADER,” Ben explains, wincing as he lowers himself horizontally onto the study room couch, a squashy white IKEA monstrosity she’d dragged from Menlo Park to Evergreen to Pacific Heights. Rey tries not to feel touched that he’s kept it still; maybe Ben just didn’t feel like disassembling the couch himself. Instead she takes in the pinched furrow between his brows, the light sheen of sweat dotting his upper lip. Retrieving the tablet from a hidden safe and decrypting the file had seemed to sap the last of Ben’s remaining energy. “We eventually decided to focus on more practical software, but this is what first got me interested in the project.”

 

Rey bites her lip. “When did you solve -?”

 

“About a month ago.” Ben clears his throat. “Technically the work’s been in theoretical limbo for decades. Now that we have the algorithm though, it’s just a matter of building the bandwidth.”

 

 _I did it_ , she hears between his proud, tired words. _I’m good, I’m good enough._

 

Weirdly, Rey knows what he means. Even after their fights and missteps and miscommunications, at least they still understand each other this way: his fears to her fears, his hopes to her hopes. Matched sets. Life was easier when she’d known herself in the context of him, when she could imagine the people they might grow into together - but he’s not hers to keep anymore; she doubts all the shared emotional baggage in the world could change that.

 

“Ben,” Rey says softly, kneeling down on the carpet so they’re face to face. “Why are you showing me this?”

 

His eyes crack open a fraction. “Maybe I just want to impress you,” he says, the corners of his mouth twitching upward - a whole grin distilled down into one muscle tic. “Since the flowers didn't work.”

 

Rey flushes. “Be serious,” she mutters.

 

That only makes him smile wider, cautious and sweet before propping up on one elbow and reaching out a hand to brush his knuckles over the fuzz of her cheek, the careful touch flooding heat out to her ears and down her throat, as astonishingly new and familiar as if they did this every day, as though she’d missed him without knowing for years.

 

“I am serious,” says Ben. “I’ve always been serious about you.”

 

Rey’s throat goes dry. Without thinking, she blurts out, “Does your mother know?”, and sees his face go blank like a blizzard in July.

 

“No,” he says slowly, followed by, “are you going to tell Leia?”

 

“Uh.” She should, she really should - because this kind of technology is as dangerous as it is powerful - but even if the collective might of First Order’s lawyers and the US intelligence community wouldn’t put her in a black site for violating federal law and half a dozen confidentiality agreements, what difference does it truly make? The outcome of VADER isn’t going to hinge on some professor with zero political or military capital; that’s not her role and this isn’t her story, so Rey focuses on the rough slide of Ben’s fingertips over her cheek, warm and calloused and real, and admits, “I don’t know. I still don’t understand why you’re doing this.”

 

“I want you to _help me make it better_ ,” Ben says.

 

Rey squeezes her eyes shut. “You’re seriously trying to recruit me _now_?”

 

“Not recruit. Consult.”

 

“On what?” she asks disbelievingly, because First Order has a notoriously opaque, intense hiring process that washes out all but the geekiest and most talented CS graduates; KQED once ran a long article bemoaning the university-to-private industry pipeline in STEM that named it as one of the worst offenders. Everything Ben could need, he has in-house or on retainer, so whatever response Rey’s expecting, it’s not:

 

“A new advisory council,” Ben proposes. “After...extensive discussion and consideration, I recognize that VADER could do a better job protecting privacy and civil liberties. Since my mother seems to have handpicked you as her personal crusader in this area, I thought we could - work together to find a balance.”

 

He looks as nervous as Rey feels, wringing his hands and clenching his jaw and Rey says, slightly dazed, “I think your board might have a few issues with that plan.”

 

“Fuck the board,” says Ben. “I trust you.”

 

And it figures he would know the one thing both exactly right and wrong to say at the same time; Rey stares at him open-mouthed, stunned, because even when misguided and poorly timed and presumptuous, Ben’s always been sincere. He may have a new haircut and a bigger bank account, but he’s still the man who built her paper airplanes and took her flying, left filthy love notes in margins of her lab notebook, called her sweetheart and made her laugh delightedly and for whom her first instinct will always be to say yes, of course, yes.

 

Rey remembers thinking once, a lifetime ago, how if she ever had the chance and courage, she’d ask Ben why he didn’t pick her up that day at SFO - whether it was because of VADER or something else, if he thinks on balance that it was worth it - that she’d tell him maybe, if they were very careful, there could be a second chance.

 

But then, the Rey who follows her heart over her head, never mind realistic consequences or collateral damage - that’s not who she is. Ben may have loved her but Rey’s not some prize book or toy, to be cherished when convenient and set aside safely afterward, so instead of taking up his earnest half-thought-out offer she says, “What do you honestly think would happen?”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

Rey leans in; it makes Ben go a little cross-eyed, which would be more gratifying if he hadn’t just suffered a head injury. “Would we be able to keep it professional?” she pushes. “Sit across at tables, shake hands, go home quietly to our separate lives?”

 

The two of them in close quarters have always been dangerous, a slippery slope, and this time is no different, Ben’s throat jumping at her question, dark eyes heating up to a thousand degrees. “Sure,” he rasps.

 

“No,” Rey says. “It wouldn’t be that simple. We’d forget. We’d have a good time. And then at some point we’d disagree and it wouldn’t matter because internal ethics board or not, you’re ultimately in charge and your rules are on the only ones that matter.”

 

“I _wouldn’t_ -”

 

“You would.”

 

Coloring in frustration, Ben growls, “Then what exactly do you want me to do, Rey?”

 

“I don’t know anymore,” she throws back. Looks away defensively. “I’m sorry, but - I’m sorry. There’s nothing.”

 

Ben goes stiff and silent for a long time; when he speaks again it sounds brittle, like scraping the bottom of a well finally gone dry. “You can’t just -”

 

His voice trails off, and Rey thinks how ironic it is that with nine programming languages between them, of course this would turn out to be the one thing they can’t communicate over. When she creeps a hand across the couch to hold his own, she’s surprised to find it tremoring with emotion. Rey’s used to thinking that she was the sucker who cared too much but Ben’s always been able to surprise her with the depths of his convictions and joy and hatreds and loves. She feels improbably lucky to have run with him and slept curled into his side, to have been found fascinating, special, necessary by Ben, but they couldn’t be lonely together anymore - this is for the best, she reminds herself, this is the smart thing to do.

 

“I never wanted-” Ben says abortively, running a distressed hand through the lank tangle of his hair. “I thought we could put the past behind us,” he tries, looking as desperately unhappy as she’s ever seen him, and it’s all Rey can do it lean in and kiss him softly in apology. Ben’s lips taste of Tylenol and unpronounceable Japanese bottled water and his tongue curls around hers like a greeting, like a goodbye, but that feels almost secondary to the way his hand cups the back of her neck as he sits up on the couch. There are fingers tugging at her hair and her shoulders and her waist, all searing with urgency and possessiveness, all at odds with the untidy gasp Ben lets out when she digs her nails into his bicep for balance, and the surge of unbearable tenderness that triggers - _it’s not just her_ \- is what makes Rey close the circuit, give Ben what he needs.

 

Rey only knows one way to kiss - deep and exploratory and a little reckless - so she arches up to lick further into his mouth and it’s like collapsing into a singularity, the laws of spacetime buckling, warped by the inexorable gravitational pull of a whole universe of touch expanding at lightspeed: Ben sucking on her lower lip now, hungry and sweet and yearning, before moving on to the corners of her eyelids, so tender it makes her feel newborn, bloomed-open.

 

She’s seen Ben at his worst, angry and hurting, and at his best, cheeks flushed manic with excitement and joy. But it’s still strange to finally pull away and feel his skin leave a warm imprint on her own, to watch his mouth sag and his eyes grow bright and red-rimmed. Of all the kinds of loss Rey has ever known, she thinks this one will haunt her the longest: the way Ben’s face slides from disbelief to disappointment to resignation, because he still thinks he’s in the right, and that means there’s no future for them.

 

“Me too,” Rey confesses, and hopes he understands. Rey thinks it’s fine if Ben hates her forever after this, for folding after he showed all his cards, as long as they can both move on and stop hurting each other. So when Ben’s head bows and his shoulders slump like he’s too exhausted to even look at her anymore, Rey doesn’t take it personally, just lets him draw in a single shuddery breath and waits for him to come to terms with the fact that some things are indeed unsalvageable, that they might never find their way back to each other again, not ever.

 

“Okay,” Ben says after a long time. “Okay.”

 

*

 

Two weeks later, Rey’s juggling a tray of cupcakes with one hand while texting Finn her ETA for the Storm-Tico engagement dinner when the back of her neck prickles in warning. The last thing she sees before every muscle in her body seizes up simultaneously is a slim profile and the flash of a pale white wrist - strangely familiar - and then she hits the kitchen floor, deadweight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so I'm a lying liar who lies and this fic will actually be complete by the end of march good NIGHT

**Author's Note:**

> For anyone who's interested:
> 
> First Order Technologies is loosely based on the real-life company Palantir.
> 
> AHCH-TO is inspired by an amalgam of AI/robotics labs at Stanford and MIT.
> 
> And yes, the Department of Defense is deadass pursuing a huge cloud acquisition project called JEDI. How could I not work that into this story?
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> As always, feedback/reactions/concrit is much loved and taken to heart :) 
> 
> I'm...also on twitter now I guess?: https://twitter.com/OfPillar


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